Analysis of Spent Nuclear Fuel Imaging Using Multiple Coulomb Scattering of Cosmic Muons

TL;DR

This study explores the use of multiple Coulomb scattering of cosmic muons for imaging and monitoring spent nuclear fuel in dry casks, demonstrating successful reconstruction of contents and detection of missing assemblies.

Contribution

It introduces a muon scattering-based imaging method for nuclear fuel casks, showing its effectiveness in various storage scenarios and potential for non-invasive nuclear safeguards.

Findings

Successful reconstruction of dry cask contents

Detection of missing fuel assemblies in most scenarios

Resolution limitations in identifying exact missing assembly locations

Abstract

Cosmic ray muons passing through matter lose energy from inelastic collisions with electrons and are deflected from nuclei due to multiple Coulomb scattering. The strong dependence of scattering on atomic number Z and the recent developments on position sensitive muon detectors indicate that multiple Coulomb scattering could be an excellent candidate for spent nuclear fuel imaging. Muons present significant advantages over existing monitoring and imaging techniques and can play a central role in monitoring nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel stored in dense well shielded containers. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the applicability of multiple Coulomb scattering for imaging of spent nuclear fuel dry casks stored within vertical and horizontal commercial storage dry casks. Calculations of muon scattering were performed for various scenarios, including vertical and horizontal fully loaded dry casks, half loaded dry casks, dry casks with one row of fuel assemblies missing, dry casks with one fuel assembly missing and empty dry casks. Various detector sizes (1.2 m x 1.2 m, 2.4 m x 2.4 m and 3.6 m x 3.6 m) and number of muons ($10^{5}, 5\cdot10^{5}, 10^{6}$ and $10^{7}$) were used to assess the effect on image resolution. The Point-of-Closest-Approach (PoCA) algorithm was used for the reconstruction of the stored contents. The results demonstrate that multiple Coulomb scattering can be used to successfully reconstruct the dry cask contents and allow identification of all scenarios with the exception of one fuel assembly missing. In this case, an indication exists that a fuel assembly is not present; however the resolution of the imaging algorithm was not enough to identify exact location.