Determination of the long-lived 10Be in construction materials of nuclear power plants using photoactivation method

Abstract

The problem of handling nuclear power plant irradiated structural materials holds one of the central places in the nuclear power industry. High toxic 10Be with a half-life of T1/2 = 1.6 × 106 years is discovered in NPP structural materials after reactor operating. 10Be decays through only electrons' emission. Pure beta emitters are extremely difficult to determine in irradiated structural materials and radioactive waste. We proposed a photoactivation approach for determining the 10Be activity in NPP samples. The proposed method involves determining 9Be and 10B concentrations and subsequent recalculation of 10Be activity formed in 9Be(n, γ)10Be and 10B(n, p)10Be reactions. The amount of 9Be and 10B is determined by samples' photoactivation using an electron accelerator and 9Be(γ, 2n)7Be-, 10B(γ, p2n)7Be-reactions. These reactions' experimental yields were measured for 20, 40, and 55 MeV boundary energies of the bremsstrahlung beam. The proposed technique was tested on samples of ChNPP 2nd unit irradiated structural materials. The technique's calculated error is about 15–20%; the sensitivity is 1 Bq × g−1.