LLNL scientists have developed a simple neutron detection technique that can discriminate fissile material from non-fissile material. A low cost digital data acquisition unit collects data at high rates and processes large volumes of data in real-time. This technique functions in a passive mode much like a standard portal monitor. There are options for converting the technique to an active…

The invention utilizes the statistical nature of radiation transport as well as modern processing techniques to implement a physics-based, sequential statistical processor. By this we mean that instead of accumulating a pulse-height spectrum as is done in many other systems, each photon is processed individually upon arrival and then discarded. As each photon arrives, a decision is…