Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty And Radioactive Xenon Monitoring

Lawrence Erickson, ACDIS, UIUC (with Martin Kalinowski, CTBO Vienna, Hamburg University)

In 1997, the Provisional Technical Secretariat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization began building up verification systems as part of the International Monitoring System. These stations will monitor levels of radioactive xenon in the atmosphere. The purpose of this project is to create a database of the background levels of radioactive xenon so that the monitoring system can detect variations in the isotope ratios that may be indicative of an unauthorized nuclear detonation. There are about 450 power and research reactors worldwide that run at high enough power levels to be considered in this project. This project will catalogue the emissions of those reactors that self-report their xenon releases and estimate the emissions of reactors that fail to report. The resulting inventory will be used in atmospheric transport models to determine global distribution of the four relevant isotopes.

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