Uncertainty Analysis of Near-Field Antineutrino-Based Safeguards

Antineutrino detection systems show potential as a tamperproof, independent technology to continuously monitor nuclear reactors. Currently, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) relies heavily on surveying nuclear facilities and inventories to ensure that special nuclear material pathways are correct and complete. This process, conducted through on-site inspections, draws a significant amount of the limited resources from the IAEA. Through implementing near-field antineutrino-based safeguards, reactor core inventories can be verified without the need of expensive and invasive inspections. One proposed system, the Reactor Evaluation Through Near-Field Antineutrinos (RETINA) system, compares the real-time antineutrino flux to previously simulated fluxes to continuously monitor reactors. This proposed system, however, still needs improvement to detect slight antineutrino spectra variations. One possible method to improve this system sensitivity is through uncertainty mitigation. In this work, we analyze the uncertainty within the RETINA system for a diverse set of next generation reactor designs. Our results indicate that the leading causes of uncertainty include background uncertainty, antineutrino yield uncertainty, and systematic detector uncertainty. The magnitude of these relative uncertainties were highly depended on the antineutrino energy and the reactor design.