Non-destructive interrogation of nuclear waste barrels through muon tomography: A Monte Carlo study based on dual-parameter analysis via GEANT4 simulations

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations with GEANT4 to demonstrate that muon tomography, based on dual-parameter analysis of scattering and absorption, can non-destructively detect and distinguish nuclear materials within waste barrels.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-parameter muon tomography method using GEANT4 simulations for effective nuclear material detection in waste containers.

Findings

Muons can effectively identify nuclear materials in waste barrels.

Dual-parameter analysis improves material discrimination.

Simulation results confirm detection capability for various nuclear materials.

Abstract

In this study, we employ the Monte Carlo simulations by using the GEANT4 code to demonstrate the capability of muon tomography based on the dual-parameter analysis in the examination of the nuclear waste barrels. Our current hodoscope setup consists of three top and three bottom plastic scintillators made of polyvinyl toluene with the thickness of 0.4 cm, and the composite target material is a cylindrical nuclear waste drum with the height of 96 cm and the radius of 29.6 cm where the outermost layer is stainless steel with the lateral thickness of 3.2 cm and the filling material is ordinary concrete that encapsulates the nuclear materials of dimensions 20$\times$20$\times$20 cm$^{3}$. By simulating with a narrow planar muon beam of 1$\times$1 cm$^{2}$ over the uniform energy interval between 0.1 and 8 GeV, we determine the variation of the average scattering angle together with the standard deviation by utilizing a 0.5-GeV bin length, the counts of the scattering angle by using a 1-mrad step, and the number of the absorption events for the five prevalent nuclear materials starting from cobalt and ending in plutonium. Via the duo-parametric analysis that is founded on the scattering angle as well as the absorption in the present study, we show that the presence of the nuclear materials in the waste barrels is numerically visible in comparison with the concrete-filled waste drum without any nuclear material, and the muon tomography is capable of distinguishing these nuclear materials by coupling the information about the scattering angle and the number of absorption in the cases where one of these two parameters yields strong similarity for certain nuclear materials.