Measurement of 241Am Ground State Radiative Neutron Capture Cross Section with Cold Neutron Beam. Progress Report on Research Contract HUN14318 for the CRP on Minor Actinide Neutron Reaction Data (MANREAD)

The ground state cross section of 242Am has been measured with beams of cold neutrons at the Budapest Research Reactor using the X-ray emission of the decay product of 242Pu. This methodology avoids the uncertainty caused by resonance neutrons in the pile activations. The target was characterized with gamma and X-ray spectrometry. The obtained ground state cross section is 540 ± 32 b, which is at the low end of the most recent literature values, but agrees with most of them within their uncertainty. (author)