Chasing after Poltergeists: Underground Nuclear Forensics Facillity at Los Alamos National Labratory - Overview and Outlook

The Nuclear and Radiochemisty Group Counting Facility supports a comprehensive set of nuclear security missions, that require the radiometric analysis of a wide variety of operational and exercise samples. For decades we have performed thousands of gamma-ray spectrometry measurements samples in support of treaty monitoring, weapons radiochemistry, and nuclear forensics. More recently, our sample load of U and Pu nuclear forensic samples has increased, and we have recognized the need for improving our non-destructive analysis (NDA) capabilities to characterize everything from trace to bulk samples of U and Pu in a wide range of geometries. In this talk, I will present details of our new facility for specialized applications like measuring very small activities of U and Pu. I will focus on our new low-background laboratory being constructed in a historic Manhattan-project era tunnel in the Los Alamos canyon. This talk will describe the specialized detectors that are in use in the laboratory, our custom analysis software, and the highly specialized measurements that we are capable of making in this unique space.