Analysis of Spent Nuclear Fuel Imaging Using Multiple Coulomb Scattering of Cosmic Muons

Abstract

Cosmic ray muons passing through matter lose energy from inelastic collisions with electrons and are deflected from nuclei due to multiple Coulomb scattering. The strong dependence of scattering on atomic number Z and the recent developments on position sensitive muon detectors indicate that multiple Coulomb scattering could be an excellent candidate for spent nuclear fuel imaging. Muons present significant advantages over existing monitoring and imaging techniques and can play a central role in monitoring nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel stored in dense well shielded containers. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the applicability of multiple Coulomb scattering for imaging of spent nuclear fuel dry casks stored within vertical and horizontal commercial storage dry casks. Calculations of muon scattering were performed for various scenarios, including vertical and horizontal fully loaded dry casks, half loaded dry casks, dry casks with one row of fuel assemblies missing, dry casks with one fuel assembly missing and empty dry casks. Various detector sizes (1.2 m x 1.2 m, 2.4 m x 2.4 m and 3.6 m x 3.6 m) and number of muons ($10^5,5\cdot 10^5,10^6$ and $10^7$) were used to assess the effect on image resolution. The Point-of-Closest-Approach (PoCA) algorithm was used for the reconstruction of the stored contents. The results demonstrate that multiple Coulomb scattering can be used to successfully reconstruct the dry cask contents and allow identification of all scenarios with the exception of one fuel assembly missing. In this case, an indication exists that a fuel assembly is not present; however the resolution of the imaging algorithm was not enough to identify exact location.

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Atmospheric muons as an imaging tool
• Verification of spent nuclear fuel in sealed dry storage casks via measurements of cosmic ray muon scattering
• Muon Tracing and Image Reconstruction Algorithms for Cosmic Ray Muon Computed Tomography
• A Generalized Muon Trajectory Estimation Algorithm with Energy Loss for Application to Muon Tomography
• Detection of Missing Assemblies and Estimation of the Scattering Densities in a VSC-24 Dry Storage Cask with Cosmic-Ray-Muon-Based Computed Tomography
• A New Semi-Empirical Model for Cosmic Ray Muon Flux Estimation
• $\mu$TRec: A Muon Trajectory Reconstruction Algorithm for Enhanced Scattering Tomography
• A Compact High-Resolution Muon Spectrometer Using Multi-Layer Gas Cherenkov Radiators
• Methodologies for imaging a used nuclear fuel dry storage cask with cosmic ray muon computed tomography
• Monte Carlo Characterization of the Cosmic Ray Muon Flux in Subsurface Geological Repositories
• Verifying Spent Fuel Containers Before Deep Geological Storage with Cosmic Ray Muons