Could a Neutrino Beam Destroy a nuclear weapon? Yes.

[newmac]

Physicists at the KEK laboratory in Japan and the University of Hawaii have proposed a “futuristic but not necessarily impossible technology” that would use an ultra-high energy neutrino beam to destroy nuclear weapons. However, the researchers stress that the method is well beyond the capabilities of current particle accelerators and would require substantial R&D and financial investment by many nations (H Sugawara et al. 2003 arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062).

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles of matter and come in three ‘flavours’ – electron, muon and tau neutrino. They are electrically neutral and only interact weakly with matter, which means that they can pass through thousands of kilometres of matter without being absorbed.

In 1999 the first so-called long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, K2K, involved sending a neutrino beam from KEK to the Superkamiokande detector 250 km away. There are plans underway to send a neutrino beam from Fermilab to the Soudan lab in Minnesota, 710 km away and from CERN to Gran Sasso in Italy, 730 km away. The new method for destroying nuclear weapons proposed by Hirotaka Sugawara, Hiroyuki Hagura and Toshiya Sanami is a “vast extrapolation” of such experiments.

neutrino beam

The researchers suggest sending a neutrino beam with an energy of 1000 TeV through the Earth to wherever the nuclear weapon was located (see figure). The beam would produce neutrons in a ‘hadron shower’ and would cause fission reactions in the plutonium or uranium in the bomb. These reactions would either melt or vaporize the bomb.

Such a high energy neutrino beam would be difficult to produce, the physicists admit. The storage ring would have to be 1000 km across - hundreds of times larger than the biggest present day accelerators. The magnets in the specially built muon storage ring would need to be one to two orders of magnitude stronger than those currently available to construct a realistically sized machine. Moreover, the cost of building such a device could be over $100 billion and it would consume 50 GW of energy – the entire power consumption of the United Kingdom.

Finally there is the risk, the authors point out, that the interaction of the neutrino beam with the bomb “could lead to a full explosion” instead of eliminating it.
About the author

Belle Dumé is Science Writer at PhysicsWeb

[lurky]

1. Add this to the Bad Idea List.

It gets longer every week...

[izquierdista]

4. Along with with idea of the computer

I mean really, what can you do with a machine made of 18,000 vacuum tubes that takes up a whole room and needs to have water running all the time or it will burn up? And all that just to be able to add some binary numbers.

[lurky]

5. False analogy.

Creating a 600-mile-wide radiation generator to set off spontaneous fission reactions in nuclear materials around the world, possibly resulting in actual detonation, but certainly resulting in the release of large amounts of highly-radioactive uranium and plutonium. And let's not forget the unknown and unintended consequences of attempting this. This is a planetary-scale experiment they are suggesting, and we would all be the subjects, like it or not.

Why you think this is equivalent to early computer research is utterly beyond me. :shrug:

[izquierdista]

9. Close analogy

Just as small efficient neutrino generators are unknown now, microscopic diodes and triodes were unknown until the 1950s. You are dismissing the physical principle simply because the implementation of it is currently unrealizable. If you were to look forward, you would see that this is the principle behind a Star Trek like "weapon deactivation ray". It is worthy of further investigation.

[GA_ArmyVet]

11. It goes right along with the idea

that just because something can be done, does not mean it should be done. My big question is what are those beams doing to the internal engine in the the earth when it passes through...what if it causes some unintentional global consequences like oh...reversing magnetic fields or some other unexpected event..good lord Nukes are bad, but fooling aroound with something on that scale is even more insane.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. I can see it now, people supporting this course of action to form

an organization.... www.muon.org oops, my bad, it's already taken.

[Skidmore]

3. Why the $^#%% should we even be asking this question?

I don't understand why people would even want to invent these weapons technologies. If mankind becomes extinct because of them, we will have earned it.

[Hanse]

6. Leading magicians say a team of griffon-riding dwarves could crush valkrie opposition.

While magicians say team of griffon-riding dwarves is technically unrealistic, our journalists will be bringing you the latest in this frightening breaking news.

[BlooInBloo]

7. Vaporware.

[rrneck]

8. Will it cook a box knife?

How long before some asshat in the DoD tells us we just have to spend about a gazillion dollars or the terrorists/Chinese/Taliban/Al Quaeda will win?

[krispos42]

10. Seems like a neutrino bean would make an excellent telecommunications carrier

You could beam your program straight through the Earth. No satellites needed. Aim a beam downwards to connect New York to Bejing, for example.

[Fovea]

12. Has anyone asked a geologist about 1Tev

worth of energy in a tight beam passing through structures like fault lines at the surface?

Ok, they are not massive particles, but this strikes me as a piss poor idea on many levels, such as.
If we had that kind of joules in storage, why not just end poverty forever with free energy?

What is the NIMBY factor in a 1000KM ring, and how exactly would our system be hardened against a russian or chinese attack?

And, if there generation/storage facilities could not withstand a preemptive attack, would that not simply return us to 1961?
We would have to launch a pre emptive attack, just as we are now contemplating with Iran, but millions of times worse.