Determination of initial fuel state and number of reactor shutdowns in archived low-burnup uranium targets

This article presents a method for destructive analysis of irradiated uranium (U) targets, with a focus on collection and measurement of long-lived (t1/2 > ~10 years) and stable fission product isotopes of ruthenium and cesium. Long-lived and stable isotopes of these elements can provide information on reactor conditions (e.g. flux, irradiation time, cooling time) in old samples (> 5–10 years) whose short-lived fission products have decayed away. The separation and analytical procedures were tested on archived U reactor targets at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of an effort to evaluate reactor models at low-burnup.