Hunter Andrews on how Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy, or LIBS, is a versatile tool for molten salt reactor applications.

If we want to measure solid salts, you still need to keep it inert. If you want to measure liquid salts, it needs to be inert. During the reactor operation, you have aerosol formation, you have radiation, you have fuel moving in and out of the core, changing chemistry, the list goes on and on and on. We're getting aerosol formation with particle sizes ranging from 10 to the submicrons down to fractions of microns. And we need to be able to measure that in situ. LIBS is a high energy laser pulse focused down to a single point on a solid that will ablate the material and form a plasma in liquids and gases and aerosols that ionizes the atoms there and forms the plasma. As that microplasma cools back down, it emits characteristic light, which we can measure with the spectrometer, giving us an elemental fingerprint of the sample.

Not only can we collect the light with fiber optics and locate our spectrometers, the expensive equipment at distance, but we can also locate our laser source and computer and everything at distance too by delivering the laser pulse via fiber. It doesn't really care if something's radioactive as long as there's enough to be able to measure it. We don't have to worry about high background swapping radiation detectors. We just have to worry about being able to find peaks that we can either isolate or deconvolute to be able to calibrate a system.

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