Nuclear Engineering Commons^™

Thermodynamic Characterization And Isothermal Separability Of Heavy Fission Product Chelates For Post-Detonation Nuclear Forensic Analysis, Steven Adam Stratz

Doctoral Dissertations

Nuclear terrorism, one of the most critical threats to national security, exhibits complexities that do not exist with similar threats from sanctioned state actors. Responding to a domestic nuclear terrorism strike is difficult when the original source of the weapon may be unknown, given that terrorist organizations (at the time of writing) do not themselves have nuclear technology sufficient to design and build nuclear weapons. Consequently, the development of forensic techniques to help source and characterize nuclear weapons after detonation has recently become an area of interest. This relatively new field of science, known as post-detonation nuclear forensics, aims to …