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Antineutrino Device Tackles Nuclear Proliferation
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."
They are extremely difficult to detect, but not impossible. Moreover, nuclear reactors produce quite a lot of them.
As a recent example, the KamLAND neutrino experiment (http://kamland.lbl.gov/) used a 1000 ton detector in Japan to study the flux of neutrinos emitted from dozens of reactors in Japan and Korea, some hundreds of miles away. KamLAND performed precision studies of the propagation of neutrinos over distance, and was also able to detect the rising and falling neutrino fluxes as various reactors powered up and down.
The detection device described in the article is much smaller, but it's located much closer to the reactor. I've heard talks on this, and it seems quite reasonable.
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=