[en] In an effort to upgrade outdated instrumentation and to take advantage of current and imminent technologies the Nuclear Chemistry Division at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is about to undertake a major upgrade of their low level radiation counting and analysis facilities. It is expected that such a project will make a more coordinated data acquisition and data processing system, reduce manual data handling operations and speed up data processing throughput. Before taking on a systems design it is appropriate to establish a definition of the requirements of the facilities. This report examines why such a project is necessary in the context of the current and projected operations, needs, problems, risks and costs. The authors also address a functional specification as a prelude to a system design and the design constraints implicit in the systems implementation. Technical, operational and economic assessments establish necessary boundary conditions for this discussion. This report also establishes the environment in which the requirements definition may be considered valid. The validity of these analyses is contingent on known and projected technical, scientific and political conditions