Feasibility of Detecting Plutonium Breeding Blankets Using Antineutrinos

The Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement between the United States and Russia makes arrangements for the disposal of 34 metric tons of excess weapon-grade plutonium. Under this agreement Russia plans to dispose of its excess stocks by processing the plutonium into fuel for fast breeder reactors. To meet the disposition requirements this fuel would be burned while the fast reactors are run as burners, i.e., without a natural uranium blanket that can be used to breed plutonium surrounding the core. Furthermore, India is presently building a Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) that would run on plutonium-enriched fuel and which could be used to launder reactor-grade plutonium into weapon-grade plutonium. In this note we discuss the potential application of non-intrusive antineutrino monitoring to the verification of the presence of a breeding blanket. We find that a 24 kg antineutrino detector, exploiting coherent elastic neutrino- nucleus scattering and made of silicon could determine the presence of a breeding blanket at a PFBR-type reactor at the 95% confidence level within 90 days.