Slashdot Mirror
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...)"
And how do you lock onto the targets? If you can get a conventional radiation detector close enough, you might as well just send in the Marines to pick up the nuke. You can't use neutrinos to detect them because (1) detector efficiency is abysmal and (2) fission reactors and the sun provide a tremendous background signal.
And suppose you do somehow build an aimable neutrino beam. What happens if a rogue operator points it at a fission reactor? You're right that it almost certainly cannot ignite the pit of a bomb because the storage configuration has a low reactivity. Reactors, on the other hand, operate near unity reactivity. I don't know enough about reactor physics to say what is possible, but I'd be very worried that the neutrino beam could liberate enough unexpected heat to put the reactor in a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity regime. Boom. Like the Chernobyl disaster, but potentially much bigger.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
So could this be used to destroy a nuclear power station?
> On a serious note, what happens if you miss with this thing?
Well, as long as you don't hit anything fissionable you're probably ok.
I don't see how this could be useful though - if an adversary has more then one bomb they'll probably use the second as soon as their first is melted by this thing. Plus, you'd need to know the exact position of their whole nuclear arsenal... and if you know that why not just stage tactical strikes against all of them simultaneously?
Maybe if you could aim this thing fast enough and it has a reasonably wide area of effect you could use it as a missle defense system. Of course, it would only defend against nulcear missles, not any other sort of warhead.
What the article doesn't say is why this is any better than putting the nuclear material in a fast reactor and disposing of it that way? It would be orders of magnitude cheaper, and we've had the technology for decades. The heat produced can be used to generate electricity as well. France and Japan run fast reactors. The UK and USA used to have them too.
Stick Men
This is equivalent to ~1 Sv/sec. We note that this value of the radiation dose is very large, compared with the U.S. Federal off-site limit of 1 mSv /year.
Lets see...
1 mSv = 1/1000 Sv
1 year = 31.5 million seconds
SO....
1 Sv/sec = 31.5 TRILLION mSv/year
So this simple device produces 31.5 Trillion times the safe limit of radiation.
SURE, protecting the world from nuclear winter by substituting it for cancer on a world-wide scale.
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
There is a bad taste in our mouths from the wild anti-nuclear BS thrown about.
It all started with the film the China Syndrome.
There are over a hundred operational energy nuclear plants in the US and about 3-4 times that many research and isotope production plants in the US and about a thousand military reactors and there has been 1 problem with them since 1975.
One problem - Three Mile Island.
Burning of coal produces more radiation every year in the United States than all the hundreds of reactors put out.
In Japan there have been some problems with poor handling of fuel.
In France there have been no significant problems.
In Russia, well they don't build very smart reactor complexes sometimes now do they?
For every lie the nuclear industry and government put out there is a lie put out by the Anti-Nuclear Movement.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
1) Only a few countries are big enough to hold such a device. They're already nuclear powers, and they're pretty responsible users thereof.
2) Because of how huge it is, it's probably not going to be near a coastal region. So you gotta bomb it or ICBM it (short range ballistic missiles aren't gonna cut it, nor is a flotilla of cargo ships with smuggled weapons. :)
3) It's a lot easier to defend a 1000km ring with anti-ballistic missiles for 15 minutes than it is to defend an entire continent. (You only need to set up your ABM tech every 100km or so around the circumference.)
4) For superpowers, the countermeasure is to build your own 1000 km neutrino ring. (And short of starting WWV, there's no way for Superpower Foo to prevent Superpower Bar from building one!) Two superpowers with such rings have effectively rendered each others' nuclear arsenals obsolete. That's effective deterrence without the sword of mutually-assured destruction hanging over everyone's head.
5) Meantime, all rogue nuclear states' base are belong to the superpowers, because rogue states don't have the land mass to ever build a countermeasure.
6) $100B isn't that pricy if you amortize it out over 10-20 years. And much like nukes, even though the weapons haven't been used in 60 years, one hell of a lot of science has been done along the way. Your MRI and PET scans are as much an offshoot of nuclear weapons research as the fission plants that provides a good chunk of your electricity without a gram of CO2 (for those that believe CO2 is a hazard).
I have this theory and this stuff falls underneath it.
Of course there are problems, big 600 mile radius problems, and this just might punch a 600 mile wide whole in my theory.
But I thought I would throw it out and see if anyone wants to bite.
The theory goes like this. Truly new technology, and by truly new I don't mean the newest chips, I mean stuff that you cannot imagine, well stuff like this. The government has been working on truly new technology for at least 10 years by the time we hear about it first.
My definition of new technology is very, very tight. It is not the refinement of old technology.
As an example we have been reading about quatum computing for lets say 5 years now. I am suggesting that 15 years ago the government got a head start on it. Hell if they have a use for it I bet that they have a mainframe already. Granted super-duper top secret. But I am suggesting that this stuff exists.
Well I will be the first to admit that this punches a whole in my theory. Cause I can't imagine how you could hide a 600 mile wide ring like this.
Anyone think of a way?
Also there is another hole. A device like this would probably work best if it's construction was kept secret (not that that may be possible) but once it existed it would work best if everyone knew about it.
You wouldn't want it to be secret then. You would want it to be public knowledge that you had a way to resolve the Korea problem.
Just random crazy thoughts.
Hey check this out, I am late in taking my meds.
Reference 13 of the paper goes into how you could use a high-energy neutrino beam to image the inside of the earth.