Reactor antineutrinos and novel application to real-time remote monitoring of nuclear reactors

Abstract

ABSTRACT We have constructed a computational scheme to obtain energy spectra of reactor antineutrinos, including the inverse β -decay process through which they were to be detected. The antineutrino spectra from all the fission products were calculated based on the gross theory of β -decay. This data was combined with an inventory of fission products obtained by burnup calculations, and then multiplicity and reactor antineutrinos spectra were obtained by a summation calculation. We compared aggregate antineutrino spectra emitted from four major actinoids 235 U , 238 U , 239 Pu , and 241 Pu calculated in this work with experimental values. We found that those obtained by using Fission-Product Yield (FPY) data of JENDL-5 could reproduce the measured data better than or almost equivalently with those obtained with FPY data of other recent nuclear data libraries. Then, we proposed a new method of nuclear safeguards by using reactor antineutrinos; namely, we found that changes in the number and energy spectra of reactor antineutrinos were strongly correlated with burnup and fissile composition of light-water reactors.