Department of Chemistry Seminar

About the event

Speaker: Dr. Nic Uhnak with PNNL
Host: Dr. James Boncella

Title: Nuclear Forensics at PNNL: A Multidisciplinary Examination of Nuclear Data

Abstract
In an era of increasing global instability, the prospect of finding nuclear devices or materials outside of regulatory control is an ever-increasing concern, while the threat of a nuclear detonation becomes a sobering reality that we may face. In this threat filled landscape, nuclear forensics emerges as means to decipher fundamental questions: what is it? Where did it come from? How did it get there? Within nuclear forensics, there are two domains, framed in the context of a nuclear device, pre-detonation and post-detonation. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is one a few laboratories tasked with stewarding US capabilities that investigate materials in both domains. In this talk, the broader topic of nuclear forensics will be discussed as it pertains to PNNL, however further focus will be applied to the post-detonation domain. We will highlight the efforts of a highly diverse multidisciplinary team examining a pursuit to improve the nuclear data for several high impact isotopes. These nuclear data examinations explore fission products yields and single isotope decay schemes, both radiochemically separated and unseparated with a variety of radiation spectroscopic techniques including advanced coincidence systems.