Los Alamos National Laboratory plays an important role in modern international nuclear safeguards, treaty monitoring, non-proliferation, and nuclear forensics. Advancing these missions involves interdisciplinary progress in a broad range of topics including investigating how forensic signatures are created in nuclear materials or during nuclear events, how those signatures are distributed in the environment, and improved techniques for measuring those signatures. Much of this work involves measuring isotope ratios, and this broadly aligns with the skills of a modern isotope geochemist. In this talk, we discuss the role that isotope geochemistry plays in pre-detonation and post-detonation nuclear investigations. We then provide examples of some of the isotope-based research being undertaken here at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including the investigation of extinct radionuclide signatures, chronometry of uranium materials, and bioaccumulation of nuclear effluents in the environment.

LA-UR-24-22860

Bio:

Dr. Jeremy Inglis is an isotope geochemist with a jointly awarded PhD degree from Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England and Syracuse University, New York, USA. He works within the Chemistry Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he specializes in ultra-low level isotope measurements by mass spectrometry. He is one of LANL’s lead scientists for pre-detonation and post-detonation nuclear forensics. Jeremy’s current research focuses upon understanding bioaccumulation of anthropogenic isotopes in the environment.