Uranium Enrichment Determination Using a New Analysis Code for the U XKα Region: HyperGam-U

HyperGam-U was recently developed to determine uranium enrichment based on γ- and X-ray spectroscopy analysis. The XKα region of the uranium spectrum contains 13 peaks for 235U and 238U and is used mainly for analysis. To describe the X-ray peaks, a Lorentzian broadened shape function was used, and methods were developed to reduce the number of fitting parameters for decomposing the strongly overlapping peaks using channel-energy, energy-width, and energy-efficiency calibration functions. For validation, eight certified reference material uranium samples covering uranium enrichments from 1% to 99% were measured using a high-resolution planar high-purity germanium detector and analyzed using the HyperGam-U code. When corrections for the attenuation and true coincidence summing were performed for the detection geometry in this experiment, the goodness of fit was improved by a few percent. The enrichment bias in this study did not exceed 2% compared with the certified values for all measured samples.