Nuclear Monitoring with Antineutrinos

Nuclear power plants can produce plutonium for weapons, so international inspectors would like a system that could tell from the outside whether material has been removed from a reactor. In Physical Review Letters, researchers describe a system that could monitor the state of the reactor core by detecting the antineutrinos it emits. The system would require improvements beyond today’s detector technology, but experts say that such advances could be available in several years.