Employing antineutrino detectors to safeguard future nuclear reactors from diversions

Christopher Stewart,Abdalla Abou-Jaoude,Anna Erickson

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11434-z

Abstract

The Non-Proliferation Treaty and other non-proliferation agreements are in place worldwide to ensure that nuclear material and facilities are used only for peaceful purposes. Antineutrino detectors, sensitive to reactor power and fuel changes, can complement the tools already at the disposal of international agencies to safeguard nuclear facilities and to verify the States’ compliance with the agreements. Recent advancement in these detectors has made it possible to leverage them to reduce the likelihood of an undetected diversion of irradiated nuclear material. Here we show the sensitivity of antineutrino monitors to fuel divergence from two reactor types: a traditional light-water reactor and an advanced sodium-cooled reactor design, a likely candidate for future deployment. The analysis demonstrates that a variety of potential diversion scenarios can be detected by such a system. We outline recent developments in monitoring capabilities and discuss their potential security implications to the international community.

Highlights

The Non-Proliferation Treaty and other non-proliferation agreements are in place worldwide to ensure that nuclear material and facilities are used only for peaceful purposes
Inspectors cannot rely on refueling cycles to monitor these reactors as they typically do for Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR), which operate on an 18–24month cycle
Aptly named inverse beta decay (IBD), an antineutrino interacts with a proton producing a positron and a neutron that are readily detectable with standard technologies

Summary

Introduction

The Non-Proliferation Treaty and other non-proliferation agreements are in place worldwide to ensure that nuclear material and facilities are used only for peaceful purposes. Antineutrino detectors, sensitive to reactor power and fuel changes, can complement the tools already at the disposal of international agencies to safeguard nuclear facilities and to verify the States’ compliance with the agreements Recent advancement in these detectors has made it possible to leverage them to reduce the likelihood of an undetected diversion of irradiated nuclear material. More novel approaches rely on a hub-spoke model[5,6]: advanced reactors of battery-type, which rely a single but long (10–30 years) fuel loading and usually have relatively low power, are leased to the user state and returned to the provider state at the end of their lifetime for disposal or recycling of spent fuel While these proposals reduce proliferation risks associated with reactor fuel cycle, they do not eliminate it. In this paper, such a system is termed Reactor Evaluation Through Inspection of Near-field Antineutrinos, or RETINA (see Fig. 1)

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Conclusion