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Antineutrino Device Tackles Nuclear Proliferation

Posted by kdawson on from the tamper-proof-it dept.

KentuckyFC writes "One of the biggest problems in nuclear proliferation is verifying that countries are not secretly transferring fissile material by taking it out of reactors and selling it. Now a group of US scientists say they've developed a machine that can remotely detect whether a reactor has been switched on and off by detecting the antineutrinos produced by nuclear reactions. The detector is about the size of a car engine and is designed to be left near a reactor to record data. The group has been testing a prototype at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Southern California and says it works well (abstract). Now it's up to the International Atomic Energy Authority in Vienna to decide whether to deploy the new machine."

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Sensitivity? by Cyberax · · Score: 2, Interesting

    During the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_experiment they got only 3 neutrons per hour from a reactor just 11 meters from a detector.

    Neutron flux obeys the inverse square law, so this detector should detect only few neutrons per _day_ at the distance if 100 meters.

    It seems that this device will have a lot of false positives and negatives.

    1. Re:Sensitivity? by Smidge204 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You're citing an experiment performed in the 1950's.

      They can make machines that are MUCH more sensitive now, and if you're only interested in detecting presence and not actual study, they don't need to be that fancy.
      =Smidge=

  2. good test? by Bananatree3 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I do not know if it is also true for anti neutrinos, but regular neutrinos pass through almost every kind of matter I can think of. Since neutrinos emitted from the sun pass right through the earth, This property would make it exceptionally difficult for a rogue nuclear reactor to block anti neutrinos from being detected(as far as my limited physics understanding goes).

    The underground detectors that pick up the sun's neutrinos only do so quite rarely. Maybe since this detector would be sitting right next to the source it would pick up more of them?

  3. Re:Detecting (anti)neutrinos? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    The earlier version of this reactor (Kamioka) was also a very big reactor, which detected about one solar neutrino a day.



    Of course, they were very interested in directional information, and relied on neutrino-electron elastic scattering, so there may be reactions with higher detection rates.