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The Iran nuclear deal begins drawing media attention to R&D for portable antineutrino detectors

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The Iran nuclear deal begins drawing media attention to R&D for portable 
antineutrino detectors
> http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.8129

> Wired emphasized that detecting antineutrinos is hard. If you shot
> them “through 6 trillion miles of lead shielding,” the article
> explained, “half of them would pass right through, like ghosts.” It
> cited the July 2014 Physical Review Letters (PRL) paper “Antineutrino
> monitoring for heavy water reactors,” which was accompanied by the
> American Physical Society (APS) explanatory write-up “Nuclear
> monitoring with antineutrinos: A system to monitor a nuclear reactor
> for possible diversion of weapons material would use an antineutrino
> detector parked close to the facility.”

> Concerning verification vs. trust, the write-up emphasized that
> antineutrino detectors could overcome problems inherent in monitoring
> under adversarial circumstances. It began by summarizing:

> Nuclear power plants can produce plutonium for weapons, so
> international inspectors would like a system that could tell from the
> outside whether material has been removed from a reactor. In Physical
> Review Letters, researchers describe a system that could monitor the
> state of the reactor core by detecting the antineutrinos it emits.
> The system would require improvements beyond today’s detector
> technology, but experts say that such advances could be available in
> several years.

> APS also explained:

> Such a system would include a large amount of a scintillator material
> such as mineral oil or plastic. A high-energy antineutrino (greater
> than 1.8 mega-electron-volts) striking a proton in the scintillator
> would produce a positron (antielectron) and a neutron, with most of
> the kinetic energy in the positron. The system would measure the
> positron’s energy based on the flashes of light it produces as it
> decelerates in the scintillator.

> The general media are only just now beginning to notice
> antineutrino-detector R&D, but IEEE Spectrum has been watching for
> more than seven years.



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The Iran nuclear deal begins drawing media attention to R&D for portable antineutrino detectors Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-08-03 13:27 -0500

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