The nondestructive assay (NDA) of nuclear material must deal with large sample sizes and high self-absorption. Typical containers range from 2-L bottles to 220-L drums, and even a small sample with a high concentration of nuclear material has significant self-attenuation. Although gamma-ray self-attenuation may frequently be ignored in the filter papers or small vials encountered in radiochemic...

The subject of ttis chapter is the function and operation of the components of a gamma-ray spectroscopy system. In Chapter 3 it was shown that the output pulse amplitude from most gamma-ray detectors is proportional to the energy deposited by the gamma ray. The pulse-height spectrum from such a detector contains a series of full-energy peaks superimposed on a continuous Compton background. Alth...