Slashdot Mirror
Antineutrino Detection Is About To Change the Game In Nuclear Verification (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: There may be a new option for the detection of illicit nuclear weapons programs worldwide: Antineutrino detection is an existing technology that, if political and diplomatic hurdles are overcome, could be put in place before the 10-year ban on Iranian enrichment R&D is lifted. Difficult to evade, antineutrino detection technology could allow the international community to reliably monitor a country's nuclear activities in real-time, potentially without setting foot in the country. Similar in cost and technological scale to the space-borne reconnaissance methods governments use for detection today, antineutrino detection could not only help identify undeclared nuclear reactors, but could monitor nuclear facilities and detonations throughout the Middle East and beyond.
So in essence, this new method would allow the existing superpowers to continue to keep their boots on the throats of developing countries who may want to pursue nuclear ambitions.
Reminds me of the story by Isaac Asimov named "The Dead Past." A machine is invented that can see into the past using neutrinos. The government runs a huge version trying to look into the past. One man discovers that a very simple version can be made, and is being covered up by the government. He later realizes that there is a very good reason for this. The past includes one second ago, and the machine basically allows you to spy on anyone at any time. By releasing the plans, he eliminated any kind of privacy.
...the Middle East and beyond...
Really, why single out the middle east, to what purpose?
Silence is a state of mime.
TFA seems to read as an attempt to encourage the building of neutrino observatories in various countries (such as, oh say, Iran) as much as a call for their use to monitor reactor activity at mid-field distances (10s of km.)
Far-field observatories (100s of km) could be built today but are expensive. Mid-field observatories would need to be built within a country to be close enough to monitor a reactor, but (the author argues) they provide prestige to the country that hosts the observatory.
I like neutrino observatories. I'm not sure Iran would like them as much as TFA's author thinks.
Also, in terms of neutrino science, wouldn't it be kind of stupid to build a neutrino observatory near a source of noise like a reactor? That would be like building a radio telescope near a TV broadcast tower.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So this means we will learn that Israel "officially" has nuclear bombs?
As far as Iran is concerned, there is...no ban on Iranium enrichment.
Announcing Iranium! Just as fissible as the infidels' uranium, with half the blasphemy!
I assumed that with the observation that Pluto is not comprised significantly of plutonium, Iran would unilaterally rename that element to Iranium. Once that's over, then they can start pursuing UN resolutions to return all Iranium to Iran.
They just need to be careful of the phrasing, because some nations may "deliver" the Iranium in a rather destructive manner.
You'll overload the detector.
Could this technology be used to detect nuclear submarines ?
They wants to keep track of Iran, and none of these countries is interested in using it as a worldwide real-time submarine detector. Totally believable.
That is some Game of Thrones level of hypocrisy right there.
Be careful of what you wish for..
SDA would use detectors all over the Earth in a pseduo-spherical Beam forming array to inversely "scan" the surface of the sphere and produce a high resolution monitor of neutrino activity. It may later be used for oil exploration and studying currents within the deeper mantle cores.
The equations are relatively simple and any third grader could work them up in a modern calculator.
Beam forming arrays were once used with sonar, then with radar, and now with audio signals to both "steer" sound propagation, and "detect" sound with geolocation information.
Looking at things from a purely selfish standpoint as an American I absolutely support a policy of denying additional foreign powers entry into the nuclear arms club while actively maintaining our own stock pile of weapons and ability to strike.
In fact nukes are pretty much the only weapons system I am completely okay with the Federal government having all to itself as using even the small ones in sort of domestic conflict either between Feds and the States or government in the more general sense against the public is darn near impossible to imagine. Imagine if Lincoln had the ability to nuke Richmond in 1863. Doing so would not have brought any sort of Union victory it would plunged the country in to even greater chaos, probably destroying support for even the concept of the United States continued existence.
On the other hand our national government having a strong nuclear capability provides the ultimate trump card. It means if we ever did see another Great War style conflict no nation, even the other large nuclear powers, can threaten our home land. If it ever does become a matter of fightin 'them' over here, they know we could push the button. Its nice to live under the safety of the nuclear umbrella.
See if you let more people with less to loose though join the club that is when things get dangerous. All it takes is one religious fanatic to come to power, conclude his dreams of destroying the infidel and creating a world wide caliphate/spaghetti bowl/coven can't be realized as long as we exist *boom* because (s)he might not care what happens in retaliation to their corner of this globe.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Always believed in MY Golden Rule: regretless workability: what's right IS right because it works, and vice verse; no regrets, no problem. Sidesteps human evolutionary features such as ego feelings and beliefs, let alone silly stuff like culture, identity, politics, religion.
The bad deal with Iran has led the smarter people elsewhere to fix the problem the usual way: brains and work. ROTFFLMFAO.
AGM2015: Antineutrino Global Map 2015 in Scientific Reports (Nature).
Google Maps showing neutrino sources.
You can even see the Iranian reactor at Bushehr.
IEEE Spectrum also had an article on this topic last month: link
All it takes is one religious fanatic to come to power...
None of those in the US, right?
Can you explain how a particle that can pass through 1000 lights of lead could be detected by a refrigerator sized box? I bet it's interesting physics going on there.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Except, it wouldn't matter.. the US won't live up to its treaty obligations even when it can no longer pretend they have none.
Our religious fanatics are too worried about gay marriage to use nukes.
Yeah I'm sure the world will be a safer place when NK gets their hands on real nukes.
And Iran would still have it's democratically elected leader instead of enduring the Shah for 38 years.
I'm not sure which is worse. You only have 1 example (NK) to show, but the US has toppled more than one leader and supported more than one brutal regime.
It's a sort of "risk/reward" equation. How does one balance years of tyranny under a brutal regime against the bad actors?
Also, NK might already have one, or likely they are on the verge of having one, which 'kinda makes your argument irrelevant.
It didn't have a "you will be bombed and invaded" penalty clause. Destabilizing every non Sunni hellhole in the middle-east has fucked up my backyard too much, I don't trust a word coming out of Israel and the US any more. We have to try something else now, I don't think it can be worse than the alternatives.
I don't buy the gloom and doom of Iranian nuclear weapons even if they did get them. I don't see it as a worse threat than the Likud mad dogs and their quest to get their promised land, they're getting ready to annex their previously ethnically cleansed Golan Heights right about now, or their Haredi cousins some of who literally think of me as little more than cattle and who could become a majority in a couple of decades.
Actually what the article talks about are short range detectors which only have a range of a few hundred kilometres. A better solution would be a huge, scalable detector, perhaps an extension of the south polar IceCube experiment to really low, MeV energies, which could have global reach. Not only would the facility be capable of detecting any nuclear reactor or weapon test anywhere on the planet but you could do some really amazing astro-particle physics with it. We expect to get the neutrino mass hierarchy from just dropping the energy threshold to ~1GeV with PINGU, with lower thresholds you might even be able to consider using neutrinos to do a sort of CT-scan of the planet (possible because while neutrinos rarely interact with matter, matter does affect how they oscillate - something called the MSW effect).
Ultimately all such a facility does is prevent anyone from operating any nuclear reactor in secret. I would argue that this is not a bad thing at all. Countries can still develop and use nuclear power but they cannot do so without everyone knowing about it. It would also provide a completely impossible to defeat (short of sabotaging the detector) means of enforcing the nuclear test ban treaty.
Ah... the "our crazies are better than your crazies" argument. High class.
A machine is invented that can see into the past using neutrinos. The government runs a huge version trying to look into the past. One man discovers that a very simple version can be made...
Indeed a very simple version can be made. Get a light-tight bag and stick it over your head (just make sure you can breath somehow though). You now have an accurate view of the past as seen by neutrinos given that they almost never interact with matter and not at all with light. I guess this was part of Asimov's success: as a chemist he would never let physics get in the way of a good story!
It means if we ever did see another Great War style conflict no nation, even the other large nuclear powers, can threaten our home land.
That was actually an important motivation of many of the scientists who promoted nuclear research in the 1920s and 1930s - they'd just witnessed a devastating war of attrition, and thought that nuclear weapons would not only make this kind of war obsolete, they'd make the entire concept of war between nuclear-armed nations unthinkable. It's important to remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, by themselves, no worse than any number of other atrocities committed by the Japanese, Germans, Russians, British, or Americans - some of the Allied firebombing campaigns late in the war managed to kill more people in one go than either nuke. Nuking Japan simply sent the message "look, now we can do it with just one bomb."
So if these particles are neutral and can go through God Knows how much lead without ever interacting, how the fuck are we detecting them? Is it just a statistical thing where there's a 1/100000000 chance of an interaction but there are so many particles that it overcomes that?
"The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke,[1] which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the space-time continuum."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
You do know how poorly your country is monitoring and guarding those weapons of mass destruction right? That should be the most concerning part!
I don't think you must listen to the Iranian leaders much.
If they manage to erase Israel from the pages of history do you think you'll survive the process? What about your people?
It appears that both Iran and al Qaeda believe in what is referred to as "involuntary martyrdom". The Israelis? Not so much.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
> could monitor nuclear facilities and detonations throughout the Middle East
Clue: it will never be implemented. (Hint: there is a zionist A-bomb factory located in the underground levels of the Dimona reactor and the zionists regularly conduct zero-yield tests in the Negev desert. Nobody dares to look at or speak about those facts, expect Mordechai Vanunu. The german-gifted Dolfin class zionist submarines are full of nuclear-tipped Turbo Popeye cruise missile / IRBM hybrids. They have been fitted with an unusual extra-large diameter torpedo launch port to let nukes fit through. German Nobel prize author Gunther Grass complained about that detail and was promptly declared anathema.)
With the N Korea, Pakistan, and finally the Iran deal as frosting on the cake, the Western World admitted it did not have the spine to stop nuclear proliferation, and if it cannot stop a small backward nation that wants to live in 700AD from getting nukes, it will certainly not stop somebody once they have nukes.
Western Europe, first de-populating itself under the weight of socialism, and now overrun by waves of Muslim immigrants that political correctness rules-out stopping has more immediate problems and needs the cash its multinationals think they can get trading with proliferating nations. The US, lead by an incompetent fool and self-confessed drug addict, sees no harm in destroying the anti-proliferation regimes and surrendering to proliferators - the dude could not even get a journalist freed as part of his unilateral surrender.
Seriously, What do you think would HAPPEN if any cheating was detected?????? The ink was hardly dry on Obama's Iran deal when Iran violated it twice, first by sending Quds Force commander Soleimani to Moscow, and second by launching a nuclear-capable ballistic missile on a test flight. Both were prohibited by the deal. Both were detected. Any penalties pending????
If this keeps the termite-mound nanny states the ability to detect 'inappropriately enriched uranium' and keep their mitts out of everyone's business, then it looks like modern particle physics will finally begin to pay its dues to mankind.
But that's a big IF. More likely this is yet another layer of useless technology that doesn't build or create anything, useless in the end because its global coverage would not become complete without bankrupting us all, and practical countermeasures may exist. The kind that a high school student might envision in a science fair. Predictably those vested in this political-military pork barrel will first try to Classify the science fiar exhibit and give the student a lucrative job, then discredit its science publicly, and the prohibition beat goes on.
We are at this moment facing an existential threat, a threat that has arisen from the suppression of nuclear power research and deployment. These last 40 years have been a technological 'dark age' for nuclear power. A continuation of wars for oil (while ostensibly for other things), a steady increase in the cost of basic energy units required to run a modern household, a steady reduction of options in the energy mix as we are now poised to hang our entire energy future on one single thread, natural gas.
All this as the value of the dollar and practical influence begins to fade. Also we are at the twilight of the petro-dollar as world currency.
Through this Modern Dark Age there have been echoes of the previous ones. The Church of Environmentalism has arisen to gather power and stifle the various indigenous cultures of research and scientific development that were in the process of refining and perfecting nuclear energy. Just as the Vatican had astronomers in Galileo's time, this church supported its own esoteric nuclear magii --- the chosen ones in particle physics who pursue Specifically Fusion Not Fission. Like the Holy Grail it is always around the corner, just beyond the bend. Never mind that fusion is hard and fission is easy in its fundamentals... and compared to fission its practical application is many years away... with a little faith one can ignore the dangerous threat that humanity might begin to bog down in its petroleum present and might not even survive in its modern form until the Grail is found. A practical physicist might run the numbers and decide "Hey! This is ridiculous. We have more people, we need to unlock more energy now. Let's get fission on-line first." But the Church of Environmentalism has forgiven them this concern for the immediate future.
In the early 1970s at around the same time we last set foot upon the moon, something irredeemably ugly took hold of the United States. A group of people rose to power --- from all walks of life --- with two forms of blindness.
The first blindness had nothing to do with so-called Environmentalism (ask Steward Brand or others who have awoken). It was a simple irrational fear of radiation.
The next blindness, by far the worst, has nothing to do with so-called Environmentalism either. It is a casual disregard for simple math. It is now someone else's job to 'do the math', or take steps to ensure our survival in the short term. Those people in whom you have placed your trust have deceived you, even as they have deceived themselves. Math on population growth, declining EROEI of petroleum sources, and more recently a mass-delusion that unreliable energy sources plus storage technology (presently as illusory as stable fusion containment) are ready for prime-time... we are headed for a sorry-ass short term future.
If we had not abandoned fission research 40 years ago, better and safer nuclear plants would be on-line by now and you'd have your electric cars.
After a few more Winters, ask the people of Vermont if it was a good idea to shut down Vermont Yankee. Right this minute many of them are piping in natural gas to generate electricity which they are usin
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
...is with a good guy with a nuke.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This year's underhanded C coding challenge deals with nuclear warhead identification: http://www.underhanded-c.org/_...
I don't speak their language, but I have read quite a few transcriptions. I've read transcriptions from Rabbi Fishman, Yitzhak Shapira and Ovadia Yosef as well.
Israel might not believe in involuntary martyrdom, but it's a big believer in ethnic cleansing. I don't think if they try to do that for all of the land Rabbi Fishman wanted we'll get away without some type of WMDs going off either, if not nuclear then biological.