Speaker
Description
The long term management of high-level nuclear waste will necessarily involve nuclear transmutations of highly radioactive materials by accelerator driving systems converting long lived radioactive waste products to short lived or stable nuclei. $^{243}$Am is the most abundant, long lived radioactive product in high-level nuclear waste while the neutron capture cross section is known with some high level uncertainty ($>$10 %) where uncertainties of approximately 2% are needed for transmutations.
The challenges of studying the neutron capture cross sections includes the traditional difficulties of working with actinide materials. We have made significant progress in the production and handling of actinide targets generally, and $^{243}$Am specifically. We implement solution combustion synthesis methods to make robust targets on a variety of backing materials. An initial measurement at the LANSCE facility using the DANCE array of detectors showed that the purity of the target can yield precise cross-sections. We intend to present our preliminary results.
This work is funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration under Grant # NA0004256.
| Contribution category | Experiment |
|---|---|
| Presenter status | Faculty/Staff |