Monitoring and Discovering Reactors Using Antineutrino Detectors

Antineutrino emission rates and energy spectra encode information about the operational status, total power output, and fissile content of operating nuclear reactors. Researchers in Russia in the 1980s, and more recently our group in the US, have experimentally demonstrated that ton-scale antineutrino detectors operating outside of containment at some tens of meters for nuclear reactor cores can be used to measure these signals. The devices are no more complex, and by some measures are easier to deploy, then, e.g., the hundreds of portal monitors that have already been deployed in the US and elsewhere for the purpose of screening automobiles, pedestrians, and cargo for nuclear materials. The antineutrino experiments have further shown that data can be collected on time scales – from hours to months - that are of interest for existing and future reactor monitoring protocols, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency's 'Safeguards' regime.
Much larger detectors, from 100,000 to 1,000,000 tons, would be sensitive to signals from small reactors operating at distances of hundreds of kilometers, and this tantalizing prospect has begun to attract the attention of the nonproliferation community. Detectors of this kind, based on water doped with gadolinium, are also being developed by the physics community, to pursue fundamental studies of neutrino properties. In this presentation I will discuss work undertaken by our group towards the realization of both large and small antineutrino detectors for nonproliferation applications, and explain the natural overlap of technology with needs identified by the fundamental neutrino physics community.

Speaker: Adam Bernstein, Lawrence Livermore National Labs

Room 3105