JAEA: Non-destructive detection of nuclear material: Low-cost suspicious object inspection
-Development of low-cost and highly portable nuclear material detector-
JAEA:
Transportation-related facilities such as airports need to detect nuclear material hidden in luggage.
Nuclear material detector is expensive:
The active device that examines an object by irradiating it with radiation has the highest performance.
However, the active device has a problem that it is expensive and large.
The reason why active equipment is expensive is that it requires the incorporation of a radiation generator.
Cost reduction of radiation generator:
If the cost of the radiation generator can be reduced, the cost of the active device itself can be reduced.
Therefore,
Rotate the radiation source at high speed,
Change the radiation intensity,
We have developed a radiation generator (rotary irradiation device).
Inexpensive with rotary irradiation device:
Developed a much cheaper and smaller rotary irradiation device than the conventional active device.
In addition, we made an active device principle demonstrator that incorporates this.
Confirmed nuclear material detection performance:
We have confirmed through experiments that it has the same detection performance as conventional active devices.
Field of use:
from now on,
Not only inspections at transportation-related facilities, etc.
It is also expected to be used for suspicious object inspections at large-scale events.
Japan Atomic Energy Agency: Press Release
https://www.jaea.go.jp/02/press2021/p21060402/
A reliable and robust non-destructive detection method for nuclear materials using a neutron source
2021.06.07
With the increase of today’s global terrorist threat,
a large-scale terrorist attack using nuclear materials
that can cause enormous damages can actually occur.
Consequently,
devices for nuclear security that are used to detect nuclear materials
have grown increasingly important.
The detection method called the active neutron method is the most potential candidate for it.
In the active neutron method,
neutrons are irradiated into a container containing nuclear materials and then measures the emitted fission neutrons.
Though a conventional active method using a D-T tube
has high performance to detect small nuclear materials, it has significant drawbacks of being massive and quite expensive.
We therefore developed a new active neutron method that does not use a D-T tube.
The new method that we call rotation method
is a novel method for detecting nuclear materials using a neutron source such as californium.
In this method,
while a neutron source is rotated rapidly nearby a measurement object, neutron measurement is carried out by synchronizing the rotation motion.
If the object contains a nuclear material, as the rotation speed increases,
the larger deformation of time distribution of neutron counts is observed, which in turn resulted to the detection of the nuclear material.
In addition to its features of low cost and portability,
this method is capable of detecting uranium that emits very few spontaneous fission neutrons.
We presented the fundamental principle of this method and its effectiveness for detecting nuclear materials through the experimental verifications.
The results of this study have been published in the Annals of Nuclear Energy entitled as “First demonstration experiment of the neutron rotation method for detecting nuclear material”.
JAEA HP Press release (Japanese only)
Press Release – JAEA Nuclear Science and Engineering Center