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Old 08-24-2015, 08:13 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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It's worth mentioning too that certain laboratories that serve the mining and geological industries make use of small nuclear reactors for a sampling technique known as Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA).
The technique was discovered in 1936 and developed from the mid 1950s after reactors became more readily available for non-military use. In the decades up to the 1980s it was largely propelled by it's use for non-destructive analysis of archaeological materials.
While these services were often done at universities with access to research reactors, sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, laboratories serving the mining industry started to acquire small reactors to provide NAA services.
There's a few labs in North America that would have reactors available in the 2013 timeline. There probably wouldn't be any in a 1980s timeline and a mere handful in the 1990s timeline.
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