Abstract
A Noble Gas Migration Experiment injected 127Xe, 37Ar, and sulfur hexafluoride into a former underground nuclear explosion shot cavity. These tracer gases were allowed to migrate from the cavity to near-surface and surface sampling locations and were detected in soil gas samples collected using various on-site inspection sampling approaches. Based on this experiment we came to the following conclusions: (1) SF6 was enriched in all of the samples relative to both 37Ar and 127Xe. (2) There were no significant differences in the 127Xe to 37Ar ratio in the samples relative to the ratio injected into the cavity. (3) The migratory behavior of the chemical and radiotracers did not fit typical diffusion modeling scenarios.
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Acknowledgments
This work would not have been possible without the support of many people from several organizations. The authors express their gratitude to the National Nuclear Security Administration, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development, the Comprehensive Inspection Technologies working group, and an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Nevada Security Technology. This work was performed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory under award number DE-AC52-06NA25946.
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Olsen, K.B., Kirkham, R.R., Woods, V.T. et al. Noble gas migration experiment to support the detection of underground nuclear explosions. J Radioanal Nucl Chem 307, 2603–2610 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-015-4639-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-015-4639-7