Investigation of Imaging Spent Nuclear Fuel Dry Casks using Cosmic Ray Muons

摘要

Recently, the use of cosmic ray muons for cargo scanning applications has been demonstrated and muons have been shown to have the potential to allow for nondestructive assessment of nuclear material accountancy. Relativistic muons have the ability to penetrate dense materials and monitoring the subsequent scattering of muons can provide information about the structure and composition of materials stored in cargo containers. The suitability of cosmic muons for a number of monitoring and imaging applications has been investigated over the years and includes applications to archaeology, volcano imaging, material identification and medical diagnosis. Novel applications of cosmic ray muons have been proposed for examination of comatose patients towards bone density monitoring and also for determination of the molten nuclear fuel location in nuclear reactors having suffered from the effects of a severe accident similar to the one happened in Fukushima.