Scintillating-fiber 14 MeV neutron detector on TFTR during DT operation

Abstract

A compact 14 MeV neutron detector using an array of scintillating fibers has been tested on the TFTR tokamak under conditions of a high gamma background. This detector uses a fiber-matrix geometry, a magnetic field-insensitive phototube with an active HV base and pulse-height discrimination to reject low-level pulses from 2.5 MeV neutrons and intense gammas. Laboratory calibrations have been performed at EG&G Las Vegas using a pulsed DT neutron generator and a 30 kCi 60Co source as background, at PPPL using DT neutron sources, and at LANL using an energetic deuterium beam and target at a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator. During the first high-power DT shots on TFTR in December 1993, the detector was 15.5 m from the torus in a large collimator. For a rate of 1×1018 n/s from the tokamak, it operated in an equivalent background of 1×1010 gammas/cm2/s (∼4 mA current drain) at a DT count rate of 200 kHz.