Newswise — A press conference held at the American Physical Society's April 2006 meeting featured several researchers who work on detecting furtive nuclear activity.
Press Conference, Sunday, April 23, 11 AMFURTIVE NUCLEAR ACTIVITY
Paul Richards of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY will describe techniques for picking out nuclear detonations from seismic data packed with thousands of daily events caused by earthquakes and chemical explosions. (In the same year, Richards also won the APS' Szilard Award, which recognizes "outstanding accomplishments by physicists in promoting the use of physics for the benefit of society" for his work on monitoring nuclear tests.)
Nathanial Bowden and his colleagues at Sandia National Laboratory, Albuquerque, NM, propose to keep an eye on reactors and their stockpiles of plutonium by detecting elusive antineutrinos that fission reactions emit. The novel reactor safeguard tool is the subject of Bowden's talk in session B8.
Geophysicists can use seismic data to estimate the force and size of an underground nuclear test.
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