“TRUST, but verify.” That was Ronald Reagan’s mantra for nuclear agreements, though the proverb itself is Russian. But verifying that a country is not cheating on one important matter of nuclear diplomacy, the manufacture of plutonium, is hard. At the moment, it can be done only by visiting the site of any and every nuclear reactor which could be employed for the task—even then, one might be hidden away. But if a project now being undertaken in America works well, hiding reactors will become much more difficult.
The Water Cherenkov Monitor for Antineutrinos, or WATCHMAN, brainchild of the energy department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, should be able to spot a suspicious reactor up to 1,000km away. A network of such devices, set up within range of someone who might not be playing by the rules, should indeed verify whether he can be trusted.
The WATCHMAN is a neutrino detector—or, to be precise, an antineutrino detector. Neutrinos and their antimatter equivalents are particles that have little mass and no electric charge. They are produced in huge quantities by stars such as the sun, by the explosion of supernovae and by nuclear reactors on Earth, but they interact with other forms of matter so weakly that a piece of lead a light-year thick (around 9 trillion kilometres) would block only half of those passing through.
It is...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1KNzL5l
No comments:
Post a Comment