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Kentucky disburses $10M in nuclear grants
The Kentucky Nuclear Energy Development Authority (KNEDA) recently distributed its first awards through the new Nuclear Energy Development Grant Program, which was established last year. In total, KNEDA disbursed $10 million to a variety of companies that will use the funding to support siting studies, enrichment supply-chain planning, workforce training, and curriculum development.
Zhengzhi Liu (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville), Stylianos Chatzidakis, John M. Scaglione (ORNL), Can Liao, Haori Yang (Oregon State Univ), Jason P. Hayward (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 701-705
Cosmic ray muon-computed tomography (?CT) is a new imaging modality with unique characteristics that can be particularly important for applications in nuclear proliferation detection and international treaty verification. Using cosmic ray muons for nuclear security presents several potential advantages. Among others, muons are generated naturally in the atmosphere, can penetrate high-density materials, and are freely available. No radiological sources are required and consequently there is no associated radiological dose. Recently, the feasibility of using muons for imaging spent nuclear fuel stored in shielded casks has been explored and has been proved beneficial. However, challenges in ?CT imaging include low muon flux of ~10,000 muons/m2/min, the effects of multiple Coulomb scattering (MCS) blurring the image, and inefficiency in being able to use all recorded muons for imaging. In this paper, we argue that the use of muon tracing should produce tomographic muon images with improved quality – or more quickly for the same image quality – compared to the case where conventional methods are used. In our paper, we report on the development and assessment of a novel muon tracing method for ?CT. The proposed method back projects the muon’s scattering angle into each pixel crossed by its PoCA trajectory then forward projects the variance of the scattering angle in each pixel to detector bins along the muon’s incident horizontal direction. Two scenarios were simulated to assess the expected detection capability of this proposed method. GEANT4 was used to model the main characteristics of 1-60 GeV muons through matter. The simulated images showed an expected improvement in resolution and a reduced the reliance on the muon momentum information compared to a more conventional muon tomography method.