Book Description

Stewardship of this nation's nuclear weapons is predicated on developing a fundamental scientific understanding of the physics and chemistry required to describe weapon performance without the need to resort to underground nuclear testing and to predict expected future performance as a result of intended or unintended modifications. In order to construct more reliable models, underground nuclear test data is being reanalyzed in novel ways. The extent to which underground experimental data can be matched with simulations is one measure of the credibility of our capability to predict weapon performance. To improve the interpretation of these experiments with quantified uncertainties, improved nuclear data is required. As an example, the fission yield of a device was often determined by measuring fission products. Conversion of the measured fission products to yield was accomplished through explosion code calculations (models) and a good set of nuclear reaction cross-sections. Because of the unique high-fluence environment of an exploding nuclear weapon, many reactions occurred on radioactive nuclides, for which only theoretically calculated cross-sections are available. Inverse kinematics reactions at CARIBU offer the opportunity to measure cross-sections on unstable neutron-rich fission fragments and thus improve the quality of the nuclear reaction cross-section sets. One of the fission products measured was 95Zr, the accumulation of all mass 95 fission products of Y, Sr, Rb and Kr (see Fig. 1). Subsequent neutron-induced reactions on these short lived fission products were assumed to cancel out - in other words, the destruction of mass 95 nuclides was more or less equal to the production of mass 95 nuclides. If a 95Sr was destroyed by an (n,2n) reaction it was also produced by (n,2n) reactions on 96Sr, for example. However, since these nuclides all have fairly short half-lives (seconds to minutes or even less), no experimental nuclear reaction cross-sections exist, and only theoretically modeled cross-sections are available. Inverse kinematics reactions at CARIBU offer the opportunity, should the beam intensity be sufficient, to measure cross-sections on a few important nuclides in order to benchmark the theoretical calculations and significantly improve the nuclear data. The nuclides in Fig. 1 are prioritized by importance factor and displayed in stoplight colors, green the highest and red the lowest priority.