Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Measurements of Plutonium in Sediment and Seawater from the Marshall Islands

During the summer 2000, I was given the opportunity to work for about three months as a technical trainee at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL as I will refer to it hereafter. University of California runs this Department of Energy laboratory, which is located 70 km east of San Francisco, in the small city of Livermore. This master thesis in Radioecology is based on the work I did here. LLNL, as a second U.S.-facility for development of nuclear weapons, was built in Livermore in the beginning of the 1950's (Los Alamos in New Mexico was the other one). It has since then also become a 'science center' for a number of areas like magnetic and laser fusion energy, non-nuclear energy, biomedicine, and environmental science. The Laboratory's mission has changed over the years to meet new national needs. The following two statements were found on the homepage of LLNL (http://www.llnl.gov), at 2001-03-05, where also information about the laboratory and the scientific projects that takes place there, can be found. 'Our primary mission is to ensure that the nation's nuclear weapons remain safe, secure, and reliable and to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons worldwide'. 'Our goal is to apply the best science and technology to enhance the security and well-being of the nation and to make the world a safer place.' The Marshall Islands Dose Assessment and Radioecology group at the Health and Ecological Assessments division employed me, and I also worked to some extent with the Centre for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) group. The work I did at LLNL can be divided into two parts. In the first part Plutonium (Pu) measurements in sediments from the Rongelap atoll in Marshall Islands, using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) were done. The method for measuring these kinds of samples is well understood at LLNL since soil samples have been measured with AMS for Pu in the past. Therefore it was the results that were of main interest and not the technique. The second part was to take advantage of AMS's very high sensitivity by measure the Pu-concentrations in small volumes (0.04-1 L) of seawater. The technique for using AMS at Pu-measurements in seawater is relatively new and the main task for me was to find out a method that could work in practice. The area where the sediment samples and the water samples were collected are high above background levels for many radionuclides, including Pu, because of the detonation of the nuclear bomb code-named Castle Bravo, in 1954