Verification of Spent Nuclear Fuel in Sealed Dry Storage Casks via Measurements of Cosmic-Ray Muon Scattering

Abstract

Most of the plutonium in the world resides inside spent nuclear reactor fuel rods. This highlevel radioactive waste is commonly held in long-term storage within large, heavily shielded casks. Currently, international nuclear safeguards inspectors have no stand-alone method of verifying the amount of reactor fuel stored within a sealed cask. Here we demonstrate experimentally that measurements of the scattering angles of cosmic ray muons which pass through a storage cask can be used to determine if spent fuel assemblies are missing without opening the cask. This application of technology and methods commonly used in high-energy particle physics provides a potential solution to this long-standing problem in international nuclear safeguards.

Novel muon imaging techniques

“…Hence, a three-dimensional imaging problem can be reduced into a two-dimensional imaging problem, and a two-dimensional FBP image reconstruction algorithm can be used in the image reconstruction. This was already demonstrated by Poulson et al [2] and Durham et al [22]. Here, we go one step further by discarding the zposition information from the measured muon hitting positions.…”

Application of muon tomography to fuel cask monitoring

“…A number of groups have used models to examine the possibility of using muon tomography [3] to nondestructively inspect nuclear fuel in dry cask storage [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Recent data obtained on a partially loaded Westinghouse model MC-10 dry cask at Idaho National laboratory have been used to demonstrate that muon tomography provides a method than can detect missing fuel bundles [11][12][13] using data taken with the Los Alamos mini-muon tracker [14].…”

“…In this paper, we apply the techniques used in [11,12,16,17] to examine the signatures of diversion of spent fuel that can be detected using muon tomography.…”

Imaging the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore using cosmic rays

“…R. Soc. A 377: 20180136 since been applied to the detection of special nuclear materials [15], used to image nuclear reactors [16,17] and spent nuclear fuel [18,19]. The method is based on the fact that muons, when travelling through materials, undergo many individual Coulomb scatterings with the charged atomic nuclei.…”

“…A different method, developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), uses measurements of the multiple scattering angles of individual muons passing through an object to create tomographic images of the object's interior structure [12]. This technique was originally developed to inspect cargo containers for illicit trafficking of nuclear material [13,14], and has since been applied to the detection of special nuclear materials [15], used to image nuclear reactors [16,17] and spent nuclear fuel [18,19]. The method is based on the fact that muons, when travelling through materials, undergo many individual Coulomb scatterings with the charged atomic nuclei.…”