A Safeguards Instrument to Monitur Spent Reactor Fuel

A hand-held instrument for monitoring irradiated nuclear fuel inventories located in water-filled storage ponds has been developed. This instrument provides sufficient precise qualitative and quantitative information to be useful as a confirmatory technique for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, and is believed to be of potential use to nuclear fuel managers and to operators of spent-fuel storage facilities, both at reactor and away-from-reactor, and to operators of nuclear fuel reprocessing plants. Because the Cerenkov radiation glow can barely be seen by the unaided eye under darkened conditions, a night vision device is incorporated to aid the operator in locating the fuel assembly to be measured. Beam splitting optics placed in front of the image intensifier and a preset aperture select a predetermined portion of the observed scene for measurement of the light intensity using a photomultiplier (PM) tube and digital readout. The PM tube gain is adjusted by use of an internal optical reference source, providing long terrm repeatability and instrumerit-to-instrument consistency. Interchangeable lenses accommodate various viewing and measuring conditions.