The MUTOMCA project: Addressing nuclear safeguard aspects with muography.

Ever since nuclear power plants have been used for the electricity production, nuclear waste, mainly spent fuel from nuclear reactors, have been accumulating worldwide. The typical handling of this highly radioactive material includes encapsulating it in strongly shielded casks, stored in dedicated interim facilities. As a safeguard measure the inspection of these containers is often required: in particular, in the unlikely event that all the existing containment and surveillance methods fail, a safe non-destructive re-verification method for casks is highly desirable. In this context, imaging techniques based on cosmic-ray muons can be applied to characterize the nuclear material inside these containers. In order to assess the capability of the muography techniques to detect the diversion of fuel assemblies, the MUTOMCA project, which is the result of an international collaboration among INFN (Italy), the Jülich Research Center (Germany), BGZ Company for Interim Storage (Germany) and European Commission DG ENERGY, aims to build a two-module muon tracker and perform a field test at a storage facility in Germany. The status of the project and preliminary results will be presented.