Antineutrino monitoring of spent nuclear fuel

Abstract

Military and civilian applications of nuclear energy have left a significant amount of spent nuclear fuel over the past 70 years. Currently, in many countries world wide, the use of nuclear energy is on the rise. Therefore, the management of highly radioactive nuclear waste is a pressing issue. In this letter, we explore antineutrino detectors as a tool for monitoring and safeguarding nuclear waste material. We compute the flux and spectrum of antineutrinos emitted by spent nuclear fuel elements as a function of time, and we illustrate the usefulness of antineutrino detectors in several benchmark scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate how a measurement of the antineutrino flux can help to re-verify the contents of a dry storage cask in case the monitoring chain by conventional means gets disrupted. We then comment on the usefulness of antineutrino detectors at long-term storage facilities such as Yucca mountain. Finally, we put forward antineutrino detection as a tool in locating underground "hot spots" in contaminated areas such as the Hanford site in Washington state.

6 pages, 4 figures, matches published version. Antineutrino fluxes provided in the supplementary material

References in corpus (6)

• Updated fit to three neutrino mixing: status of leptonic CP violation
• Experimental Results from an Antineutrino Detector for Cooperative Monitoring of Nuclear Reactors
• Cosmic ray muon computed tomography of spent nuclear fuel in dry storage casks
• Antineutrino monitoring for the Iranian heavy water reactor
• Directional Antineutrino Detection
• Invited Article: miniTimeCube

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Neutrino Detectors as Tools for Nuclear Security
• Flavor-dependent radiative corrections in coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering
• Verification of spent nuclear fuel in sealed dry storage casks via measurements of cosmic ray muon scattering
• Reactor neutrino applications and coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering
• Observation of Reactor Antineutrinos with a Rapidly-Deployable Surface-Level Detector
• Full background decomposition of the CONUS experiment
• The use of CEvNS to monitor spent nuclear fuel
• Nuclear Reactor Monitoring with Gadolinium-Loaded Plastic Scintillator Modules
• Nonfuel Antineutrino Contributions in the High Flux Isotope Reactor
• Cerium ruthenium low-energy antineutrino measurements for safeguarding military naval reactors
• Liquid-organic time projection chamber for detecting low energy antineutrinos
• Status and Perspectives of Neutrino Physics