
208 Nuclear Forensic Analysis
and
144
Cs will have thus completely decayed to
144
Ba before fractionation processes
become evident. Consequently,
144
Ce should be refractory, with the distribution of its
concentration in debris proportional to that of the other refractory products. These
phenomena explain the interesting observation that, although
141
Ce and
144
Ce are
chemically identical in the laboratory, they are distributed in bomb debris as if they
had different chemical properties. This result is strictly an artifact of the differences
in the elemental distributions of their ssion precursors.
Another
interesting exercise is the study ...