Remote reactor ranging via antineutrino oscillations

Abstract

Antineutrinos from nuclear reactors have the potential to be used for reactor monitoring in the mid- to far-field under certain conditions. Antineutrinos are an unshieldable signal and carry information about the reactor core and the distance they travel. Using gadolinium-doped water Cherenkov detectors for this purpose has been previously proposed alongside rate-only analyses. As antineutrinos carry information about their distance of travel in their energy spectrum, the analyses can be extended to a spectral analysis to gain more knowledge about the detected core. A Fourier transform analysis has been used to evaluate the distance between a proposed gadolinium-doped water-based liquid scintillator detector and a detected nuclear reactor. Example cases are shown for a detector in Boulby Mine, near the Boulby Underground Laboratory in the UK, and six reactor sites in the UK and France. The analysis shows potential to range reactors, but is strongly limited by the detector design. It is concluded that the proposed water-based detector is not sufficient for ranging remote reactors in a reasonable time, but other detector designs show potential.