PNNL

Abstract

The Swedish Automated/Unattended Noble Gas Analyzer (SAUNA) is a nuclear explosion monitoring technology that was developed to provide continuous field measurement of radioxenon gas escaping from an underground nuclear detonation. This capability is a key to the verification of the Comprehensive nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). While the SAUNA technology has demonstrated success in the field, a decade of operation primarily in the International Noble Gas Experiment (INGE) has yielded areas for improvement in operations and verification. These opportunities include measurement sensitivity, sample throughput time, system uptime, and data availability. Increasing measurement sensitivity allows for finer discrimination between manmade radioxenon signals (from sources such as medical isotope production facilities) and radioxenon signals that result from fission in a nuclear weapon. Measurement sensitivity can be increased with techniques such as halving the sample processing time or increasing the quantity of xenon extracted from the atmosphere. Additionally, improvements in gas processing technology and control system software can improve the uptime and data availability. This paper will discuss the technical requirements as well as the system and operational specifications which we expect to be the groundwork for the next-generation of radioxenon monitoring systems.