Monitoring of nuclear reactors with antineutrinos: comparison of advanced reactor systems

Abstract

Single-assembly diversion scenarios are analyzed for two advanced fast reactors, UCFR-1000 and AFR-100. The two reactors represent large and small core geometries, resulting in a larger reactor core providing good counting statistics, but relatively small fraction of material contained in a single assembly, while the small core showing poor counting statistics, but a larger fraction of the core must be altered to yield one significant quantity (SQ) of material. We consider detection probabilities of inner and peripheral assemblies. We show that while diversion inner assemblies are more feasible to detect with a PROSPECT-type antineutrino detector, they also require significantly less time to accumulate one SQ of material.