Reactor Antineutrino Signals at Morton and Boulby

TL;DR

This study evaluates the potential of water-based antineutrino detectors placed over 10 km from reactors to monitor reactor operations and detect clandestine reactors, analyzing interaction rates and energy distributions at two European sites.

Contribution

It provides detailed calculations of antineutrino interaction signals and backgrounds at specific sites, demonstrating the feasibility of remote reactor monitoring with scalable detector parameters.

Findings

Signal is about five times greater at Morton than Boulby due to proximity and reactor power.

Background from other reactors is higher at Morton but constitutes a smaller fraction of total rate at Boulby.

Boulby site offers more stringent conditions for remote reactor monitoring due to multiple reactor cores.

Abstract

Increasing the distance from which an antineutrino detector is capable of monitoring the operation of a registered reactor, or discovering a clandestine reactor, strengthens the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty. This report presents calculations of reactor antineutrino interactions, from quasi-elastic neutrino-proton scattering and elastic neutrino-electron scattering, in a water-based detector operated >10 km from a commercial power reactor. It separately calculates signal from the proximal reactor and background from all other registered reactors. The main results are interaction rates and kinetic energy distributions of charged leptons scattered from quasi-elastic and elastic processes. Comparing signal and background distributions evaluates reactor monitoring capability. Scaling the results to detectors of different sizes, target media, and standoff distances is straightforward. Calculations are for two examples of a commercial reactor (P_th~3 GW) operating nearby (L~20 km) an underground facility capable of hosting a detector (~1 kT H2O) project. These reactor-site combinations are Perry-Morton on the southern shore of Lake Erie in the U.S. and Hartlepool-Boulby on the western shore of the North Sea in U.K.. The signal from the proximal reactor is about five times greater at the Morton site than at the Boulby site due to shorter reactor-site separation distance, larger reactor thermal power, and greater neutrino oscillation survival probability. In terms of absolute interaction rate, background from all other reactors is larger at Morton than at Boulby. However, the fraction of the total rate is smaller at Morton than at Boulby. Moreover, the Hartlepool power plant has two cores whereas the Perry plant has a single core. The Boulby site, therefore, offers an opportunity for demonstrating remote reactor monitoring under more stringent conditions than does the Morton site.