Reconstruction of the isotope activity content of heterogeneous nuclear waste drums.

Radioactive waste must be characterized in order to verify its conformance with national regulations for intermediate storage or its disposal. Segmented gamma scanning (SGS) is a most widely applied non-destructive analytical technique for the characterization of radioactive waste drums. The isotope specific activity content is generally calculated assuming a homogeneous matrix and activity distribution for each measured drum segment. However, real radioactive waste drums exhibit non-uniform isotope and density distributions most affecting the reliability and accuracy of activities reconstruction in SGS. The presence of internal shielding structures in the waste drum contributes generally to a strong underestimation of the activity and this in particular for radioactive sources emitting low energy gamma-rays independently of their spatial distribution. In this work we present an improved method to quantify the activity of spatially concentrated gamma-emitting isotopes (point sources or hot spots) in heterogeneous waste drums with internal shielding structures. The isotope activity is reconstructed by numerical simulations and fits of the angular dependent count rate distribution recorded during the drum rotation in SGS using an analytical expression derived from a geometric model. First results of the improved method and enhancements of this method are shown and are compared to each other as well as to the conventional method which assumes a homogeneous matrix and activity distribution. It is shown that the new model improves the accuracy and the reliability of the activity reconstruction in SGS and that the presented algorithm is suitable with respect to the framework requirement of industrial application.

Reconstruction of the activity of point sources for the accurate characterization of nuclear waste drums by segmented gamma scanning.

This work improves the reliability and accuracy in the reconstruction of the total isotope activity content in heterogeneous nuclear waste drums containing point sources. The method is based on χ(2)-fits of the angular dependent count rate distribution measured during a drum rotation in segmented gamma scanning. A new description of the analytical calculation of the angular count rate distribution is introduced based on a more precise model of the collimated detector. The new description is validated and compared to the old description using MCNP5 simulations of angular dependent count rate distributions of Co-60 and Cs-137 point sources. It is shown that the new model describes the angular dependent count rate distribution significantly more accurate compared to the old model. Hence, the reconstruction of the activity is more accurate and the errors are considerably reduced that lead to more reliable results. Furthermore, the results are compared to the conventional reconstruction method assuming a homogeneous matrix and activity distribution.