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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Detecting clandestine nuclear activity French scientists are highlighting advanced technology they claim will help nail down countries pursuing nuclear ambitions in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They suggest a giant portable electron antineutrino detector. Electron antineutrinos are elusive particles, which almost never react with normal matter. However an operating fission reactor emits them in large quantities, and there is no way to prevent their escape. In short, this allows the international community to detect any undeclared nuclear reactor, which is likely to be used to secretly produce nuclear weapons. The tricky part however is to detect those antineutrinos, which is possible, but very difficult. Today a neutrino detector looks like a giant tank of liquid with a wall lined with photosensitive tubes. Occasionally the particle would bump into a proton, generating a positron and a neutron. The positron then produces Cherenkov radiation, which in turn is picked up by the light detectors. The technique is being developed now in several countries under the supervision of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into near-field detectors which can sense a reactor from a few tens of meters from the core and judge some of its parameters. In a paper published online by Thierry Lasserre and colleagues at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, a far-field application is suggested which would be able to detect clandestine nuclear reactors across the border from hundreds of kilometers. The detector they envision looks like a cylindrical tank of 23m radius and 96.5m length, containing some 138,000 tons of linear alkylbenzene – a chemical widely used in detergent production. The tank is transported by an oil supertanker near a suspicious region and sank to a depth of between hundreds and thousands of meters. This is done to block cosmic rays and other sources of radiation, which would give false positives. The detector then stays down for six months or more, waiting for the rare flashes caused by antineutrinos. The data then has to account for the background of antineutrinos produced by legal reactors known to the IAEA and for natural sources of antineutrinos like deposits of Uranium. If the number of events is abnormally high, there is a secret reactor operating nearby, which can further be localized by calling in a couple of similar detectors and placing them strategically around. A 300 MW reactor, for instance, can be pinpointed to within a few tens of thousands of kilometers. The catch? Building the nuclear sniffer is expensive and will require technology not currently available, although Lasserre says it will be in about 30 years. Tatarewicz: Would be a lot simpler for nations to stop provoking one another.
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