Speaker
Description
The MUTOMCA (MUon TOMography for CAsks) project is an international research collaboration that investigates muon tomography as a potential candidate for the reverification of strongly shielding spent nuclear fuel casks to strengthen international nuclear safeguards. A field trial was performed within the scope of this project, where atmospheric muons crossing these casks were measured using an experimental setup of two detectors on opposing sides, rotated over three measurement positions. Two imaging algorithms have been developed to reconstruct the cask interior from measurement data: muon-computed tomography (μCT) and maximum likelihood / expectation maximization (MLEM), based on muon absorption and scattering respectively. Good results have been obtained with μCT, demonstrating the capability of muon tomography to distinguish fuel assemblies from dummy elements using experimental data. On the other hand, a significant difference in imaging performance was observed for the MLEM algorithm when using experimental data compared to simulations. This talk presents recent results from the field trial and discusses the impact of experimental constraints, in particular the limited geometrical acceptance of the detector setup, on the muon tomographic reconstruction of spent nuclear fuel casks.