Nonproliferation Science and Policy
PNNL's scientists and engineers in the nonproliferation and arms control area line support the U.S. Department of Energy and other government agencies in ballistic missile, and conventional and nuclear weapon proliferation prevention and threat reduction, as well as environmental security.
Their research is seeded in a long legacy of expertise in weapons material production and safeguards, nuclear intelligence, environmental monitoring and Transuranic (TRU) waste management. PNNL addresses its customers' needs by forming highly expert interdisciplinary teams to solve policy and technology problems in arms control and nonproliferation agreement negotiation, implementation and verification; nuclear and conventional weapon commodity export control; proliferation prevention, regional and environmental security and many other areas.
PNNL Development: Detection technologies help to limit spread of nuclear weapons
Since the earliest nuclear tests in the years following World War II, the world has been living under the threat of nuclear attacks. Two breakthrough technologies developed by researchers at PNNL may significantly lessen that threat.
The Radionuclide Aerosol Sampler/Analyzer (RASA) and the Automated Radioxenon Sampler/Analyzer (ARSA) can detect radionuclides from nuclear explosions quickly and accurately.
The two technologies, which won a coveted Federal Laboratory Consortium award for technology transfer, are a significant advance from previous monitoring devices: they have greater sensitivity than other systems, are fully autonomous, give near real-time results and prove that a nuclear explosion occurred.
The RASA detects fission products in the form of particulate debris from atmospheric nuclear explosions. The fully automated system draws a volume of air daily through a series of filters that remove nearly all of the particles. The filters are sealed, bar coded, and passed to a radiation detection system within the unit.
The ARSA analyzes air samples for radioactive xenon that seeps from underground nuclear explosions. The ARSA collects air samples and processes them to trap the radioactive xenon on cryogenic charcoal. The system purifies the xenon and transfers it to an ultra-low background nuclear counting system. Xenon's different isotopes are measured automatically, and the results are passed to a data center.