Improved β-γ Coincidence Detector For Radioxenon Detection

The Automated Radio-xenon Analyzer/Sampler (ARSA), built by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), can collect and detect several radioxenon isotopes. ARSA is very sensitive to 133Xe, 131mXe, 133mXe and 135Xe due to the compact high efficiency coincidence detector it uses. For this reason it is an excellent treaty monitoring and environmental sampling device. Although the system is shown to be both robust and reliable, based on several field tests, it is also complex due to a detailed photomultiplier tube gain matching regime. This complexity is a problem from a maintenance and quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) standpoint. To reduce these issues a simplified coincident detector has been developed. A comparison of three different well detectors has been completed. In addition, a new plastic scintillator gas cell was constructed. The new simplified detector system has been demonstrated to equal or better performance compared with the original ARSA design in spectral resolution and efficiency and significantly easier to setup and calibrate.