Why shooting cosmic rays at nuclear reactors is actually a good idea

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Muons are common and mysterious particles that beam down from space—and can go where humans can't. That can be useful for nuclear power plants.

However, taking a muon image comes with some downsides. For one, physicists have no control over how many muons drizzle down from the sky, and the millions that hit Earth each day aren’t actually very many in the grand scheme of things. “It can take several days to get a single image in muography,” says Procureur. “You have to wait until you have enough.”are striking it from what directions. But with a single machine, you can only tell that a hollow space exists—not how far away it lies.

. But while it’s easy to take hundreds of X-ray images from different angles, it’s far more tedious and time-consuming to do so with muons.Still, Procureur and his colleagues gave it a go. The site in question was an old reactor at Marcoule, a nuclear power plant and research facility in the south of France. G2, as it’s called, was built in the 1950s. In 1980, the reactor shut down for good; since then, French nuclear authorities have slowly removed components from the building.

Fortunately, this cylinder left enough space for Procureur and his colleagues to set up four gas-filled detectors at strategic points around and below the reactor. Moving the detectors around, they were able to essentially snap a total of 27 long-exposure muon images, each one taking days on end to capture.But the tricky part, Procureur says, wasn’t actually setting up the muon detectors or even letting them run: It was piecing together the image afterward.

 

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