Erlangen 2026 – scientific programme
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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung
AGA 5: Safeguards
AGA 5.2: Talk
Thursday, March 19, 2026, 14:30–15:00, KH 00.016
Developing antineutrino-based safeguards for naval reactors — •Robin Tobias Mentel, Sarah Friedrich, Yan-Jie Schnellbach, and Adhitya Sekhar — Technische Universität Darmstadt
In a world with an increasingly chaotic security landscape, the danger of nuclear proliferation is rising. In recent years, a potential proliferation concern has emerged with the planned employment of nuclear propulsion in submarines by Non-Nuclear Weapon States under the NPT. A prominent example of this is the sale of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered attack submarines by the US and the UK to Australia under the AUKUS agreement. Here, it is important to give safeguards inspectors powerful tools for a comprehensive and reliable safeguards regime, capable of detecting a diversion of weapons-grade nuclear material. We present our research on the development and the detailed simulation of antineutrino monitoring of a few nuclear-powered submarines anchored in the base of a consenting host state. To this aim, we will simulate the antineutrino emission from a naval reactor, simulated by OpenMC, and the subsequent detection in a tonne-scale active medium a few meters away, using Geant4. While focusing on the type of nuclear reactors relevant for the AUKUS-class submarines, we will explore the plausible parameter space of nuclear reactors typically employed in other submarines in terms of enrichment fraction (20 to 97%), reactor power (50 to 150 MWth), burnup, and reactor geometry, like hexagonal and rectangular symmetry. Finally, we explore ways to implement this technique in the context of safeguards, including detector positioning, sensitivity, and integration times.
Keywords: Safeguards; Antineutrino; Verification; Nuclear arms control; Nuclear propulsion