Publications
Development of eXternal Nuclear Reaction Analysis (XNRA) Detection Technique for Quantifying Light Isotope Concentrations
The National Nuclear Security Administration's Tritium Sustainment Program is responsible for the design, development, demonstration, testing, analysis, and characterization of tritium - producing burnable absorber rods (TPBARs) and their components used to produc e tritium for the nation's strategic stockpile. The FY1 9 call for proposals included the specific basic science research topic, "Demonstration and evaluation of advanced characterization methods, particularly for quantifying the concentration of lig ht isotopes ( 1 H, 3 H, 3 He , and 4 He, 6 Li and 7 Li ) in metal or ceramic matrices". Last year the same language appeared in the call for proposals, and a project IWO - 389859 was awarded to the Ion Beam Lab (IBL) at Sandia - NM which was successful using Elastic Recoil Detection, but in the future could have resulted in tritium contamination that jeopardized other equally important NNSA projects . An alternative approach using deuterium nuclear reaction analysis was proposed and funded in FY2019 which was also suc cessful and eliminated any possibility of contaminating the Ion Beam Laboratory with tritium, and will be described in this report . (page intentionally left blank)