Monte Carlo Simulations of Cosmic Ray Muons for Dry Cask Monitoring

摘要

High energy cosmic rays continuously entering Earth's atmosphere generate a cascade of secondary rays and relativistic particles. Of those that eventually reach the surface are cosmic ray muons. Cosmic ray muons are charged particles, having approximately 200 times the mass of electron, generated naturally in the atmosphere, and rain down upon the earth at an approximate rate of 10,000 particles m~(-2) min~(-1). Energetic muons have the unique ability to penetrate high density materials allowing the distribution of material within the object to be inferred from the muon tracks. The applicability 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. Innovative applications of cosmic ray muons have been proposed for medical examination of comatose patients towards bone density monitoring and 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 Chernobyl and Fukushima.