Realtime Assessment of Nuclear Materials

Our group at Livermore Lab specializes in nuclear materials measurements and assessments. We have built detectors that we have taken from breadboard to fieldable. We have even commercialized some detectors for rugged non-expert use, such as the Fission Meter - a thermal neutron multiplicity counter and the Detective - a mechanically-cooled germanium spectrometer. We are currently developing instrumentation and analysis algorithms that rely on fast neutron and gamma scintillator detectors. Our systems merge data from dozens of detectors at rates of a million events per second. Fast neutron and gamma arrival times and energy can be used to assay fissioning materials and estimate moderation and shielding, as well as make 3-D images. The underlying hardware and software to operate these detection systems represent a jump in complexity from the previous systems and are similar to subsystems of high energy and particle physics. We will describe the challenges to convert these scintillator detection systems from expert-user laboratory instruments to non-expert field use, including automating pulse-analysis, data-cuts, data-calibration, data-compression, and especially real-time analysis and assessment.