Gamma Spectroscopy to Differentiate Radioactive Minerals

[jneilson]

What you're thinking about with subquestion 2 sounds like what the field of Nuclear Forensics is about. The ratios of certain nuclides can often be used to identify material origins and establish irradiation times, the type of reactor things came from, or dates from when they were chemically separated. It's usually very fine margins so the gamma spec portion would really need laboratory-grade HPGe detector with ultra-low background; and it also often involves isotopes that are not gamma emitters, so also involves complex chemical separation and other forms of counting like LSC, alpha spec, or even mass spec.

Also, my understanding is that it's usually used for anthropogenic materials where there's evidence of things being different to normal - for naturally occurring things, the decay chains are usually in secular equilibrium and have been static since the formation of Earth and thus likely the same everywhere, so I'm not sure there's any detectable geographical differences - except rare edge cases like near Oklo where a natural reactor historically formed and that changed the ratios of certain nuclides from what you would otherwise expect.