The use of CEvNS to monitor spent nuclear fuel

Abstract

Increasing amounts of spent nuclear fuel are stored in dry storage casks for prolonged periods of time. To date no effective technology exists to re-verify cask contents should this become necessary. We explore the applicability of Coherent-Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CEvNS) to monitor the content of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from dry storage casks. SNF produces neutrinos chiefly from ${}^{90}$Sr decays. We compare these results with what can be achieved via Inverse Beta Decay (IBD). We demonstrate that at low nuclear recoil energies CEvNS events rates exceed the IBD event rates by 2--3 orders of magnitude for a given detector mass. We find that a 10\,kg argon or germanium detector 3 meters from a fuel cask can detect over 100 events per year if a nuclear recoil threshold under 100 eV can be achieved.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Observation of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering
• Constraints on elastic neutrino nucleus scattering in the fully coherent regime from the CONUS experiment
• Future CEvNS experiments as probes of lepton unitarity and light-sterile neutrinos
• Flavor-dependent radiative corrections in coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering
• The physics potential of a reactor neutrino experiment with Skipper CCDs: Measuring the weak mixing angle
• First results from a search for coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) at a reactor site
• Probing neutrino quantum decoherence at reactor experiments
• Reactor neutrino applications and coherent elastic neutrino nucleus scattering

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Constraining Non-Standard Interactions with Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering at the European Spallation Source
• Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter. A Whitepaper