Nuclear Inspections in the Matrix Working with Radiation Detectors in Virtual Reality

Virtual environments have been successfully used to support a variety of applications relevant to nuclear safeguards, safety, and security, including IAEA inspector training, dose estimates for personnel, and facility evacuation planning. We have recently begun to explore the potential of virtual reality (VR) to support innovations in nuclear arms control, in particular, the role it could play in developingfacility architectures and verification protocols for treaties that do not yet exist. For most of these applications, there are two particularly relevant challenges: first, simulating the functionalities of the radiation detection equipment that an inspector might use, ideally in real-time; and, second, enabling interactions with this virtual equipment so that the experience becomes truly immersive and meaningful. In this paper, we discuss the respective developments made for our VR system. To illustrate these features, we report results from a simple inspection exercise that involved two players (host and inspectors)with co-presence using two HTC Vive kits. In the default scenario, a number of storage containers contained nuclear components with characteristic radiation signatures, and the task of the inspector was to confirm the authenticity of these components using a gamma (sodium-iodide) detector behind an information barrier. To model real-time radiation fields in VR, we use a hybrid approach combining precomputed radiation signatures and detector response functions based on MCNP Monte Carlo simulations combined with deterministic methods to handle shielding and attenuation effects allowing the movements of sources, detectors, and shielding materials during the exercise.