intervention although, since you are counting them at 1,000 minutes, that's

of little help, although you can count over the weekend.

We have four

detectors in each one and, depending upon the sample load, we will more or
less dedicate these four detectors to this operation.

The chemistry is

really the hang-up in the sample on plutonium and the hang-up in the chemistry is the leaching process because it takes a fair amount of space in
hot plates and you need to do this in a hood because, obviously, you have
intense acid fumes coming off and there's just so much hood space.

We can

do eight samples per month, or per week which probably is not going to be a
10

hang-up; probably the cesium will take longer because you are going to do

ll

more of the cesium samples I understand.

12

I believe this is the last slide.

Yes, it is.

This is my last figure

13

(33) and I wanted to show you what the data looks like, the plutonium data,

14

which comes off the alpha spectroscopy.

15

vertical scale is the number of alpha counts in a particular energy bin,

16

the horizontal scale are the energy bins.

17

primary interest here.

18

Now (Figure 33) these are truncated.

19

but the upper parts are not of much interest.

20

you do the chemistry and the counting, you always lose some plutonium.

21

don't really know how much and this is a problem.

22

problem, so what you do is, at the beginning of the chemistry, you put ina

23

known amount of. something that's not going

24

plutonium-236 because this follows the chemistry of the plutonium-239, it's

25

counted with the same efficiency, so, we can compare the known amount of

26

material that was put in here with the hetght of this peak, the number of

27

counts in it,

28

recovery, sO, what we are really doing is looking at the ratio of this peak

Now what we have plotted here, the

There are two peaks that are of

This is the plutonium-239 and the plutonium-236.

and that wil]

The real peaks go quite a bit higher,
The way we do this, whenever

to

You

You've got a recovery

interfere.

We put

in

give you an accurate measure of your total

164

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