New developments of a fission chamber for very high radioactivity samples

Abstract

A new fission chamber was developed and built for prompt-fission-neutron spectra (PFNS) measurements in neutron-induced fission of actinides, and is described in Taieb et al. (2016). It allowed us to minimize incident- and outgoing-neutron scattering, and optimize both time resolution and alpha to fission fragment discrimination. The fission chamber was validated and used for 238U and 252Cf PFNS measurements. In order to measure PFNS of samples with a natural alpha activity of the order of 10 MBq, further improvements to the detector were done and are presented in this work. Tests of the improved fission chamber lead to a fission fragment detection efficiency of 91% for a 14.41 MBq 240Pu deposit, and 99% for a 247 kBq 242Pu deposit. The fission chamber was successfully used for 239Pu PFNS measurements at the Weapons Neutron Research facility of the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (WNR@LANSCE).