What's the word on Pu testing?

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2011-04-19 18:43

Thank you for all of your work, UCB!

A few weeks ago I remember reading about how you would be testing for plutonium. Is this still the case?

Thanks again and again!

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Reiterating question

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2011-04-20 09:20.

Hello Mark

I too caught that word "clear" and am concerned.. End of the week seems a long ways away.

Thank you

My reading of that statement

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2011-04-20 09:48.

My reading of that statement is that there are no indications of Plutonium standing out on the first pass of the investigation. Alpha spec has a high error/noise rate, if I'm not mistaken, and may need several trials to single out possible contamination.

A while back someone posted a link to an article that dealt with detecting Plutonium directly with the HPGe detectors. That would seem like a good followup test, too.

We've taken some data over

Submitted by bandstra on Tue, 2011-04-19 19:26.

We've taken some data over the last few days with an alpha spectrometer and are currently analyzing the data. We should have a final report on that later in the week.

By the way, we are not seeing any clear signs of plutonium. The analysis is to set an upper limit so we can compare to the limits of other tests, such as the EPA data.

Mark [BRAWM Team Member]

Not seeing any clear signs of plutonium?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 2011-04-20 08:02.

Hi Mark,

First, thanks for all the work the team is doing. It's really appreciated by many.

A few questioins:

What do you mean "not seeing any *clear* signs"? Is there any idication
at all that plutonium is in the sample/s?

Also, what samples do you plan on analyzing for plutonium? Are you going
to go back and analyze all previous samples (air, water, milk, food) to
get a trend?

Can you define "upper limit"?

Thanks again!!!

Thank you!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2011-04-19 19:42.

Thank you!