Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

The Tomographic Gamma Scan (TGS) technique partitions radioactive waste drums into 10x10x16 voxels and assays both the density and concentration of radioactivity for each voxel thus providing for improved accuracy, when compared to the traditional Non-Destructive Assay(NDA) techniques. It could decrease the degree of precision measurement since there is a trade-off between spatial resolution and precision. This latter drawback is compensated by expanding the Region of Interest (ROI) that differentiates the full energy peaks, which, in turn, results in an optimized degree of precision. The enlarged ROI, however, increases the probability of interference among those nuclides that emit energies in the adjacent spectrum. This study has identified the cause of such interference for the reference nuclide of the TGS technique, 137Cs (661.66 keV, halflife 30.5 years), to be 110mAg (657.75 keV, half-life 249.76 days). A new calibration method of determining the optimized ROI was developed, and its effectiveness in accurately characterizing 137Cs and eliminating the interference was further ascertained.

Keywords

Radioactive waste characterization,NDA,Tomographic gamma scan,Calibration method of TGS