Neutrino beam could neutralise nuclear bombs

New Scientist ^ | 18:51 14 May 03 | By Will Knight

[vannrox]

A super-powered neutrino generator could in theory be used to instantly destroy nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet, according to a team of Japanese scientists.

If it was ever built, a state could use the device to obliterate the nuclear arsenal of its enemy by firing a beam of neutrinos straight through the Earth. But the generator would need to be more than a hundred times more powerful than any existing particle accelerator and over 1000 kilometres wide.

"It is really quite futuristic," Alfons Weber, a neutrino scientist at Oxford University, UK, told New Scientist. "But the maths and physics seems to be right."

John Cobb, another researcher at Oxford University, cautions: "It might be technically feasible, given massive investment, but there are still unsolved problems."

Ghostly particles

Neutrinos are elementary particles with no electric charge and virtually no mass. They are produced in the nuclear reactions within stars and pass through the Earth in their thousands every day. As they pass through ordinary matter, neutrinos scatter atomic nuclei.

By scattering neutrons in uranium or plutonium, a sufficiently high-powered beam of neutrinos would destabilise a nuclear bomb. According to Hiroyuki Hagura and Toshiya Sanami at Japan's KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Hirotaka Sugawara at the University of Hawaii this would cause the weapon to "melt down" without triggering the chain reaction needed for it to fully detonate.

But the "muon storage ring" generator needed to propose the neutrino beam would need to be 1000 kilometres wide. It would also require 50 gigaWatts of power to operate - the same as used by the entire UK - and would cost an estimated $100 billion to construct.

Weber says the first stage of a generator might be feasible within 10 to 20 years, but he reckons the main problem is that the neutrino beam produced would be just a few metres wide. This means a target would need to be very precisely located beforehand. He adds that the beam would produce dangerous alpha and neutron radiation in any living thing in its path.

[ChadGore]

That's no moon . . . . . .

[NewRomeTacitus]

The liklihood of this being developed? Let
me fly up to the Fortress of Solitude...

consult the miniature scientists in the Bottled
City of Kandor and I'll get back to you on that.

[Quix]

The link in post 53 (& perhaps somewhat 54) at:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1107379/posts

makes it sound like all such are very outdated.

Which reminds me of a Navy friend I met at a human relations project--worked in some super secret stuff at 29 Palms or some such place . . .

said we had MORE THAN 10 technologies, weapons systems EACH ONE WORSE than the atomic weapons.

Wonder if he was talking about scalar stuff.

[Jaysun]

It seems to me that it would be much easier to hire spies to simply go into the nuke room of their respective countries and turn all of the batteries around in the bombs - thus rendering them useless.

[neutrino]

Watch out for them neutrino beams....

Well, at least they're not arguing about neutrino mass this time. I mean, how would you feel if all of these folks kept talking about your mass?

[Frohickey]

Good post, but I still don't see how the idea would work. A concentrated enough neutrino beam would affect more matter as it works its way through the matter it passes. Sure, the chances of it transmuting an object on the far side of the Earth increases, but so did its chances of transmuting all of the other matter between it, and the target.

The Sun is the most concentrated source of neutrinos in the solar system, and that is not enough to render nuclear weapons inoperable. How would generating a neutrino source less concentrated than what the Sun puts out transmute anything. How would anyone even be able to generate a neutrino source with more power than the Sun?

Sounds like a Debka article to me. :p

[boris]

"Considering you can get maybe 2 kW of power per square meter from solar collectors, you'd need about 500,000 square meters of solar panels to power this puppy"

The "Solar Constant" is only 1.37 kW/m2, not 2 kW/m2. Solar cells probably cannot be made more than, say, 30% efficient. So you would need much more power even if the weapon part worked as claimed--highly dubious.

--Boris

[JasonC]

The sun generates astronomically more neutrinos sure. But it is 93 million miles away, and it radiates those neutrinos in all directions. The surface of the sphere at our distance from the sun is 4 pi 93 million squared miles, or in meters around 3 times 10 to the 23rd power. This beam would be just 1 square meter. Three hundred billion trillion times less area. Going from a giant sphere to a thin pencil beam means you don't need nearly as many neutrinos overall, for the same chance of hitting a given neutron.

[rightwingcrazy]

A simple solution would be to start with a very wide beam (say, 100 kilometers on a side), and focus it down to the target, like a magnifying glass. Interaction with matter could then be minimal, except near the target. Practical details about how to generate that beam and how to aim and focus it are left to the imagination.

[Junior]

I went out and checked the numbers. You're right about the amount of solar power per square meter -- it runs between 1.3 kW and 1.4 kW. The highest efficiency came in at about 34 percent. Therefore, to power this critter, per shot, would require ~2500 square kilometers of solar panels (or a square 50 klicks on a side -- that's about 30 miles for you luddites out there). Of course, one could scale this back a bit at the cost of rate-of-fire...

[Centurion2000]

This is a complete load of crap. If you have a particle accelerator of this size, use something else besides neutrinos.

This author has no clue what.