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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung
AGA 7: Verification and Safeguards
AGA 7.2: Vortrag
Freitag, 3. April 2020, 11:45–12:10, H-HS XVII
Prospects for Safeguarding Radioactive Waste with Antineutrino Measurements — •Madalina Wittel, Anike Ohm, and Malte Göttsche — Nuclear Verification and Disarmament Group, RWTH Aachen University
The radioactive waste produced in the past decades contains many significant quantities of plutonium, one of the key ingredients for manufacturing nuclear weapons. Thus, it raises an important safeguarding challenge. For the first hundreds of years after discharge, the dominant radioactivity of the waste comes from long-lived beta-decaying elements, in particular 90Sr and 137Cs. In this talk, we discuss the prospects of safeguarding long-term geological nuclear waste repositories by detecting the low-energy antineutrinos emitted via beta-decays by the waste itself. We investigate whether these antineutrino measurements could be carried out with high resolution imaging liquid-argon (LAr) detectors. This emerging technology could detect antineutrinos even below the inverse beta decay kinematic threshold. Furthermore, due to their imaging properties, LAr detectors could also provide directionality information which may be used for background rejection and potentially for indicating if and where a certain amount of nuclear waste has been diverted. In this talk, we present a preliminary feasibility study for employing LAr detectors for safeguarding geological radioactive waste repositories. We consider a realistic repository layout as a study case and evaluate the detector performance in this context, from first principles. Finally, we address both the challenges and the advantages of employing LAr detectors for safeguards purposes.