Speaker: Tomi Akindele, LLNL
Topic: Antineutrinos as a Nuclear Safeguards Tool
Host: Svoboda
Zoom: Robert C Svoboda is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: DENS/HEP/NP Seminar
Time: Nov 10, 2020 04:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
To date, antineutrino experiments built for the purpose of demonstrating a nonproliferation capability have typically employed organic scintillator, and been situated as close to the core as possible - typically a few meters to tens of meters distant, and have not exceeded a few tons in size.
One problem with this approach is that proximity to the reactor core requires accommodation by the host facility. Water Cherenkov detectors located offsite, at distances of a few kilometers or greater, may facilitate non-intrusive monitoring and verification of reactor activities over a large area.
As the standoff distance increases, the detector target mass must scale accordingly. This talk quantifies the degree to which a kiloton-scale gadolinium-doped water Cherenkov detector can exclude the existence of undeclared reactors within a specified radial distance, and remotely detect the presence of a hidden reactor in the presence of declared reactors, by verifying the operational power and standoff distance.
A Feldman-Cousins based likelihood analysis was used to quantify the detector's ability to exclude the existence of undeclared reactors. A 1-kton scale Water Cherenkov detector can exclude gigawatt-scale nuclear reactors up to tens of kilometers. When attempting to identify the specific location of a reactor, the detector response and analysis cannot delineate between the reactor power and baseline.
