An Online High Sensitivity Measurement System for Transuranic Aerosols

A measurement system for transuranic aerosols has been designed that will be able to withstand the corrosive nature of stack effluents and yet have extremely high sensitivity. It will be capable of measuring 1 maximum permissible concentration (MPC) of plutonium or americium in 30 minutes with a fractional standard deviation of less than 0.33. Background resulting from 218Po is eliminated by alpha energy discrimination and a decay scheme analysis. A microprocessor controls all data acquisition, data reduction, and instrument calibration.