Sniffing Out A Broad-spectrum Of Airborne Threats In Seconds
June 9, 2008 — Scientists are reporting successful laboratory and field tests of a new device that can sniff out the faintest traces of a wide range of chemical, biological, nuclear, and explosive threats.
Historic Soviet Nuclear Test Site Offers Insights For Today’s Nuclear Monitoring
April 18, 2008 — Newly published data from the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear weapons testing ground during the Cold War.
Nuclear Power: Most Successful Fuel Performance Ever For US Advanced Gas Reactor Fuel
April 15, 2008 — Advanced gas reactors offer more efficient operation, less waste disposal and other benefits over water-cooled reactor designs used in U.S. nuclear power plants. But creating fuel that burns.
Energy Research: Researchers Consider Future Challenges, Opportunities
April 8, 2008 — Escalating oil and gas prices along with the global challenge of climate change has in the past few years spurred a generation of scientists to pursue alternative energy sources.
Europe To Build State Of The Art Laboratory
March 28, 2008 — One of the great ongoing challenges of astrophysics, to find out how stars evolve and die, is to be tackled in an ambitious European research program. This will involve studying in the laboratory.
Funding Cuts Jeopardize Cleanup Of Nuclear Waste Sites
March 10, 2008 — The Federal Government may need at least 20 years longer than previously planned — and an additional $50 billion — to clean up radioactive and hazardous wastes at nuclear weapons sites.
Nuclear Power Not Efficient Enough To Replace Fossil Fuels, Study Finds
March 5, 2008 — Nuclear energy must increase by more than 10% each year from 2010 to 2050 to meet all future energy demands and replace fossil fuels, but this is an unsustainable prospect.
Killer Military Robots Pose Latest Threat To Humanity, Robotics Expert Warns
February 28, 2008 — A robotics expert has issued stark warnings over the threat posed to humanity by new robot weapons being developed by powers worldwide.
US Not Set Up To Trace Nuclear Terrorist Device In Aftermath, Report Says
February 20, 2008 — The first question asked after an atomic explosion in the US (or elsewhere) would be, “Who did this to us?” But the US ability to answer that question rapidly has faded since the end of the Cold War.
Croatian Children Have Higher Weapons-related Death Rate During And After Homeland War
February 7, 2008 — The Homeland War in Croatia, which occurred from 1991 to 1995, led to an increase in weapon-related deaths of children during and five years after the end of the war.
International inspectors may have a new tool in the form of an antineutrino detector, that could help them peer inside a working nuclear reactor.
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory-Sandia National Laboratories’ team recently demonstrated that the operational status and thermal power of reactors can be quickly and precisely monitored over hour-to month-time scales, using a cubic-meter-scale antineutrino detector.
Adam Bernstein, leader of the Advanced Detectors Group at LLNL, is the project’s principle investigator. He works on the detector development project with colleagues Nathaniel Bowden, Steven Dazeley and Robert Svoboda at LLNL; David Reyna, Jim Lund and Lorraine Sadler from Sandia National Laboratories’ California branch in Livermore, and Professor Todd Palmer and graduate student Alex Misner at Oregon State University.
Antineutrinos are elusive neutral particles produced in nuclear decay. They interact with other matter only through gravitational and weak forces, which makes them very difficult to detect. However, the number of antineutrinos emitted by nuclear reactors is so large that a cubic-meter scale detector suffices to record them by the hundreds or thousands per day. As the team has demonstrated, this new detector makes practical monitoring devices for nonproliferation applications possible.
The detector could be used to determine the operational amount of plutonium or uranium necessary to run the reactor and place a direct constraint on the amount of fissile material the reactor creates throughout its lifecycle.
It is a long-recognized and fundamental dilemma of the nuclear age that nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons use very similar fuels. The fuels are generically known as fissile material — principally uranium and plutonium, either of which elements, in appropriate isotopic mixtures, can be used to build a nuclear device. Reactors consume uranium and produce plutonium, typically over periods of a year or so. Bombs consume either or both materials, in a few microseconds.
According to the National Academy of Engineering, nearly 2 million kilograms of highly-enriched uranium (90 percent or greater U-235) and plutonium have already been produced and exist in the world today — some from military and some from civil production. While these fuels can be and are used to produce electric power with incredible efficiency, it takes less than 10 kilograms of plutonium, or a few tens of kilograms of highly-enriched uranium, to build a bomb. There lies the nonproliferation problem.
