Determining reactor fuel type from continuous antineutrino monitoring

Understand

We investigate the ability of an antineutrino detector to determine the fuel type of a reactor.

• A hypothetical 5t antineutrino detector is placed 25m from the core and measures the spectral shape and rate of antineutrinos emitted by fission fragments in the core for a number of 90 day periods.
• Our results indicate that four major fuel types can be differentiated from the variation of fission fractions over the irradiation time with a true positive probability of detection at 95%.
• In addition, we demonstrate that antineutrinos can identify the burn-up at which weapons-grade mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel would be reduced to reactor-grade MOX on average, providing assurance that plutonium disposition goals are met.