Monitoring the Thermal Power of Nuclear Reactors with a Prototype Cubic Meter Antineutrino Detector

In this paper, we estimate how quickly and how precisely a reactor's operational status and thermal power can be monitored over hour to month time scales, using the antineutrino rate as measured by a cubic meter scale detector. Our results are obtained from a detector we have deployed and operated at 25 meter standoff from a reactor core. This prototype can detect a prompt reactor shutdown within five hours, and monitor relative thermal power to three percent within seven days. Monitoring of short-term power changes in this way may be useful in the context of International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Reactor Safeguards Regime, or other cooperative monitoring regimes.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Evaluating the Baluti Formation at Sararu village, Ora Anticline, Iraqi Kurdistan : a stratigraphic and geochemical approach

Open access through Springer Compact Agreement Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Colin Taylor and Walter Ritchie from University of Aberdeen for their technical support and assistance with laboratory work. We would also like to thank Mr. Omer Kamil Ali, the Head of the Qumri village, for providing accommodation during fieldwork.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A Note on Neutron Capture Correlation Signals, Backgrounds, and Efficiencies

A wide variety of detection applications exploit the timing correlations that result from the slowing and eventual capture of neutrons. These include capture-gated neutron spectrometry, multiple neutron counting for fissile material detection and identification, and antineutrino detection. There are several distinct processes that result in correlated signals in these applications. Depending on the application, one class of correlated events can be a background that is difficult to distinguish from the class that is of interest. Furthermore, the correlation timing distribution depends on the neutron capture agent and detector geometry. Here, we explain the important characteristics of the neutron capture timing distribution, making reference to simulations and data from a number of detectors currently in use or under development. We point out several features that may assist in background discrimination, and that must be carefully accounted for if accurate detection efficiencies are to be quoted.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures; Submitted to Nuclear Instrument and Methods

Application of remote sensing to selected problems within the state of California

There are no author-identified signficant results in this report

Application of remote sensing to selected problems within the state of California

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Reactor monitoring and safeguards using antineutrino detectors

Nuclear reactors have served as the antineutrino source for many fundamental physics experiments. The techniques developed by these experiments make it possible to use these very weakly interacting particles for a practical purpose. The large flux of antineutrinos that leaves a reactor carries information about two quantities of interest for safeguards: the reactor power and fissile inventory. Measurements made with antineutrino detectors could therefore offer an alternative means for verifying the power history and fissile inventory of a reactors, as part of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other reactor safeguards regimes. Several efforts to develop this monitoring technique are underway across the globe.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of XXIII International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics (Neutrino 2008); v2: minor additions to reference

Next-Best Stereo: Extending Next-Best View Optimisation For Collaborative Sensors

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Most 3D reconstruction approaches passively optimise over all data, exhaustively matching pairs, rather than actively selecting data to process. This is costly both in terms of time and computer resources, and quickly becomes intractable for large datasets. This work proposes an approach to intelligently filter large amounts of data for 3D reconstructions of unknown scenes using monocular cameras. Our contributions are twofold: First, we present a novel approach to efficiently optimise the Next-Best View (NBV) in terms of accuracy and coverage using partial scene geometry. Second, we extend this to intelligently selecting stereo pairs by jointly optimising the baseline and vergence to find the NBV’s best stereo pair to perform reconstruction. Both contributions are extremely efficient, taking 0.8ms and 0.3ms per pose, respectively. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method allows efficient selection of stereo pairs for reconstruction, such that a dense model can be obtained with only a small number of images. Once a complete model has been obtained, the remaining computational budget is used to intelligently refine areas of uncertainty, achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art batch approaches on the Middlebury dataset, using as little as 3.8% of the views.The presentation of this paper was made possible by the BMVC 2016 student bursar