Postdetonation nuclear debris for attribution.

On the morning of July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded in New Mexico on the White Sands Proving Ground. The device was a plutonium implosion device similar to the device that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9 of that same year. Recently, with the enactment of US public law 111-140, the "Nuclear Forensics and Attribution Act," scientists in the government and academia have been able, in earnest, to consider what type of forensic-style information may be obtained after a nuclear detonation. To conduct a robust attribution process for an exploded device placed by a nonstate actor, forensic analysis must yield information about not only the nuclear material in the device but about other materials that went into its construction. We have performed an investigation of glassed ground debris from the first nuclear test showing correlations among multiple analytical techniques. Surprisingly, there is strong evidence, obtainable only through microanalysis, that secondary materials used in the device can be identified and positively associated with the nuclear material.

Distribution and retention of 137Cs in sediments at the Hanford Site, Washington.

137Cesium and other contaminants have leaked from single-shell storage tanks (SSTs) into coarse-textured, relatively unweathered unconsolidated sediments. Contaminated sediments were retrieved from beneath a leaky SST to investigate the distribution of adsorbed 137Cs+ across different sediment size fractions. All fractions contained mica (biotite, muscovite, vermiculatized biotite), quartz, and plagioclase along with smectite and kaolinite in the clay-size fraction. A phosphor-plate autoradiograph method was used to identify particular sediment particles responsible for retaining 137Cs+. The Cs-bearing particles were found to be individual mica flakes or agglomerated smectite, mica, quartz, and plagioclase. Of these, only the micaceous component was capable of sorbing Cs+ strongly. Sorbed 137Cs+ could not be significantly removed from sediments by leaching with dithionite citrate buffer or KOH, but a fraction of the sorbed 137Cs+ (5-22%) was desorbable with solutions containing an excess of Rb+. The small amount of 137Cs+ that might be mobilized by migrating fluids in the future would likely sorb to nearby micaceous clasts in downgradient sediments.

Environmental scanning electron microscope imaging examples related to particle analysis.

This work provides examples of some of the imaging capabilities of environmental scanning electron microscopy applied to easily charged samples relevant to particle analysis. Environmental SEM (also referred to as high pressure or low vacuum SEM) can address uncoated samples that are known to be difficult to image. Most of these specimens are difficult to image by conventional SEM even when coated with a conductive layer. Another area where environmental SEM is particularly applicable is for specimens not compatible with high vacuum, such as volatile specimens. Samples from which images were obtained that otherwise may not have been possible by conventional methods included fly ash particles on an oiled plastic membrane impactor substrate, a one micrometer diameter fiber mounted on the end of a wire, uranium oxide particles embedded in oil-bearing cellulose nitrate, teflon and polycarbonate filter materials with collected air particulate matter, polystyrene latex spheres on cellulosic filter paper, polystyrene latex spheres "loosely" sitting on a glass slide, and subsurface tracks in an etched nuclear track-etch detector. Surface charging problems experienced in high vacuum SEMs are virtually eliminated in the low vacuum SEM, extending imaging capabilities to samples previously difficult to use or incompatible with conventional methods.