Problem is that the lying Obama Administration would never admit that Iran
was cheating even if Iran was caught red-handed.



B



http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/07/how-antimatter-could-stop-iran-cheating-nuclear-deal/118213/


How Antimatter Could Stop Iran From Cheating On the Nuclear Deal

July 20, 2015 By Patrick Tucker
<http://www.defenseone.com/voices/patrick-tucker/8219/>

Advanced particle detectors could be the key to ensuring the success of the
agreement.

*The West’s deal with Iran is based *on the premise that international
monitors at the IAEA would be able to detect illicit refinement of
weapons-grade material — no easy task when the landscape includes
radioactive detritus from previous nuclear efforts. But technologies now in
their infancy, could someday help reveal if Iran resumes its pursuit of
a bomb.

Consider the IR-40 heavy water reactor in Arak, which can produce some 10
kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium a year. Under the deal, the reactor
would be altered to perform engineering and research work, but the
radioactive traces of its original purpose might easily confuse today’s
sensors, leading to uncertainty about Iran’s ongoing efforts. “They
enriched uranium to a high level. Well, environmental sampling from now for
eons will detect that.” UN weapons inspector David Kay told *Defense One *
last week.

But what regular radiation detectors miss, antineutrino detectors could
catch. Neutrinos—and their antimatter corollary, antineutrinos—are
subatomic particles with no positive or negative charge. They pass through
virtually all material you can imagine, from lead shielding to the cores of
stars. That could allow monitors to “‘see’ into the core of a running
nuclear reactor and to measure the plutonium content in situ,” said Patrick
Huber, an associate professor of physics at Virginia Tech. Nuclear reactors
produce antineutrinos in unimaginable quantities —  up to 100 billion
billion per second.

Spotting neutrinos, which move through matter without interacting with it,
is very hard. You have to track these “ghost particles” indirectly, by
detecting their collisions’ effects on other charged particles, and you
need a lot of sensors. Examples include Japan’s Super-Kamiokande
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande> neutrino detector, which
is lined with more than 13,000 sensors for observing subatomic neutrino
interactions, and the lake-sized Antares
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTARES_(telescope)> detector in the
Mediterranean.

But antineutrinos have a different energy profile and much larger energy
flux so they are easier to detect. When an antineutrino meets a proton, the
collision produces a neutron and a positron. (Positrons are the antimatter
equivalent of electrons.) As positrons move through matter, they lose
energy and eventually collide with electrons.

When that happens inside of a so-called scintillator material like mineral
oil or plastic, these processes combine to produce measurable light.
Similar flashes occur when the neutron meets with a gadolinium or lithium
atom. Both of these flashes serve as a smoking gun for antineutrinos — and
possible illicit nuclear activity.

In a paper
<http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.042503>published
last year with several collaborators, Huber shows that it’s technically
possible to detect extremely small changes in the core of a nuclear
reactor, well smaller than would be relevant to making a nuclear weapon,
with as much as 90 percent certainty.

Moreover, solid-state scintillators are replacing liquid ones, making it
far more practical to build a deployable detector, Huber said.

“In 2011, an issue in the understanding the relation between past data and
new calculations of reactor antineutrino fluxes was pointed out by a group
at [the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre in France] and independently
confirmed by myself,” he told *Defense One* in an email. “One possible and
spectacular explanation would be the existence of a 4th type of neutrino,
which would be an entirely new fundamental particle. Whoever can prove its
existence is in line for a Nobel prize. Testing this hypothesis requires
neutrino detectors which have many—if not all—of the required
characteristics of a safeguards detector. This is currently driving the
advances in technology.”

Nobel prizes are great, but what about stopping Iran from getting a nuclear
weapon? What about the higher-than-normal background radiation
Kay mentioned?

Antineutrinos, says Huber, “are sensitive only to material in a running
reactor,” so while there is some concern of background noise, that noise
can easily be accounted for, allowing researchers to safely “determine the
plutonium content as well the enrichment level of uranium in the reactor
core.” An antineutrino detection device, about the size of a trailer, might
be vulnerable to computer hacking, like any device with  microchips, but
such a device would be incredibly difficult to spoof with fake radiation.

Antineutrino detection has never been a part of any weapons monitoring
regime. Huber, working with researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory
hopes to change that. They plan to deploy a prototype of a novel detector
by the end of the year at a commercial reactor. With enough funding, Huber
says that a fully calibrated detector could be ready to go Iran in two
years (but one with a full safeguards system likely would not be available
in fewer than five.)

Keep in mind, it only works when it’s deployed next to a known site. It
won’t detect illicit nuclear activity across all of Iran. But if you can
find an area that might be used for plutonium production, technically, you
can verify with an atomic certainty how it is or isn’t being used.




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