Year
2010
Abstract
Fission reactors emit large numbers of antineutrinos and this flux may be useful for the measurement of two quantities of interest for reactor safeguards: the reactor's power and plutonium inventory throughout its cycle. The high antineutrino flux and relatively low background rates means that simple cubic meter scale detectors at tens of meters standoff can record hundreds or thousands of antineutrino events per day. Such antineutrino detectors would add online, quasi-real-time bulk material accountancy to the set of reactor monitoring tools available to the IAEA and other safeguards agencies with minimal impact on reactor operations. Between 2003 and 2008, our LLNL/SNL collaboration successfully deployed several prototype safeguards detectors at a commercial reactor in order to test both the method and the practicality of its implementation in the field. Partially on the strength of the results obtained from these deployments, an Experts Meeting was convened by the IAEA Novel Technologies Group in 2008 to assess current antineutrino detection technology and examine how it might be incorporated into the safeguards regime. Here we present a summary of our previous deployments and discuss current work that seeks to provide expanded capabilities suggested by the Experts Panel, in particular aboveground detector operation.