Destroying Nuclear Weapons with High-Energy Neutrinos

TheMatt writes "As reported by PhysicsWeb, physicists are proposing a "futuristic but not necessarily impossible" method of destroying nuclear weapons via high-energy neutrinos sent through the earth. Based on current planned efforts, this 'vast extrapolation' of current technology would use 1000 TeV beams. This would require a 1000-km diameter storage ring using magnets orders-of-magnitude stronger than currently available. The cost would be around $100 million-plus and it'd use 50 GW of energy, the UK's current consumption. (And the slight problem that the process might set off the nukes, instead of just melting them...)"

Comments

Use the Source, Luke...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Read the original scientific paper here

Estimated cost is $100 billion+

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Not $100 million+ in /. header

100 million?

[happypizzaguy]

The cost would be around $100 million-plus and it'd use 50 GW of energy, the UK's current consumption. (And the slight problem that the process might set off the nukes, instead of just melting them...)"

Doesn't the US spend something like that producing a single bomb? A quick google search brings up an interesting result:
The US spends 100 milllion dollars every day maintaining it's nuclear arsenal.

Irradiating nukes

[Muhammar]

Shining a strong neutron source (in this case generated by neutrino beam passing through earth) on fission material would generate radioactivity and heat effect. The radioactivity would be much higher than the heat, so people around would see blue light and start dying right away.

Bombs would not go off, because the assembly of the core is always subcritical. Even if the high explosives of the implosion device goes off (because of the heat or fire, for example), the spontaneous nuclear explosion is very unlikely. These shaped charges in the implosion design have to be set off from a precise starting point at exactly same time. [Setting of the "implosion lenses" of the implosion device simultanneously was one of the major technical hurdles of the Fat Man development]

And, honestly I do not believe that such a strong neutron source could be realised using a neutrino beam.

Re:i thought...

[reverseengineer]

Well, that's really just it- neutrinos interact incredibly weakly with matter- whereas most particles have a mean free path (the average distance a particle will travel before colliding with another particle) on the order of microns (depends on particle "cross-section" (relates to its interaction with other particles, and is dependent on particle energy) and the average separation between particles (depends on density of matter in the medium). Neutrinos with a respectable 1GeV energy (1/1,000,000 of the energy proposed here) have a mean free path through solid lead (density of over 11000kg/m^3) of over a light-year.

Now, like I said, the mean free path is an average figure, so a neutrino may interact with a nucleon far sooner, or far later. In the case of earthbound neutrino detectors like Super Kamiokande, the neutrinos that are detected must make it out of the dense plasma of the sun from whence they arise, travel 150,000,000km through interplanetary space (which is basically empty for neutrino purposes), pass through the entire earth, and then into a deep mine shaft filled with something like heavy water or carbon tetrachloride (as you mentioned). A very, very small fraction of the constant torrent of neutrinos passing through this tank will bump into a nucleon and produce a detectable event. Now, if you boost the the energy of these neutrinos up to about 1,000 TeV, the mean free path of each one is reduced to roughly the diameter of the earth. While a tremendous number of neutrinos with this energy,released in a pulse, will either bump into particles somewhere in the earth's interior or will pass straight through, then through the nuke and straight out into space (a small amount would probably make it out of the galaxy eventually), there would probably enough neutrinos hitting particles in the vicinity of the nuke to produce that hadron shower and potentially ruin the bomb.

I do agree that the technology is unrealistic, however- unless a viable 100+ Telsa magnet is found (present record is about 15T for a magnet of the necessary type), the storage ring will have to be 600km in diameter. There are of course many practical problems with this design- the difficulty of aiming this sort of neutrino beam, the incredibly deadly neutron flux produced with the neutrino beam (the prospect of a misfire shooting down an aircraft or irradiating a city block is rather unappealing), and that the authors suggest that a detonation of roughly 3% of the expected nuclear device yield will still occur (or even a full detonation, if the device is a hydrogen bomb, and the "fizzle" explosion and tremendous neutron flux is enough to kickstart fusion). 3 percent of a 20-kiloton device is still the rough equivalent of 600 tons of TNT. If I were the madman dictator of a rogue state, I'd definitely think about keeping my nuclear warheads in populated areas, so the hypothetical "World Government" who holds the keys to the storage ring will have blood on its hands when they use the neutrino pulse to destory a nuke, and 10,000 of my citizens become collateral damage. That would also be an excellent pretext to retaliate with any nukes I have left.