185 - Nuclear Test Monitoring and the CTBT

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Guest: Randy Bell Host: Markus Voelter Shownoter: Stefaan Rillaert

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) is an international treaty, still being ratified, that bans all nuclear tests. An important ingredient to the test is monitoring, whether nuclear tests will be performed nonetheless. To this end, the CTBT Preparatory Commission has established a world-spanning monitoring system that relies on seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide monitoring. In this episode, our guest is Randy Bell who runs the international data center and is thus responsible for running the monitoring network and evaluating the collected data.

Introduction

0:00:30

Randy Bell (CTBTO - Comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty organization) | CTBTO on wikipedia | CTBTO on youtube | Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty | List of nuclear weapons tests | Nuclear weapons testing | U.S. Nuclear Weapon Computer Simulations | B-52

Seismic monitoring

0:24:45

Seismic monitoring | Photos | Seismometer | Triangulation | Types of seismic waves | Seismic analysis | Tomography | Map of CTBTO monitoring stations | Common mode failure

Hydroacoustic monitoring

0:43:00

Hydroacoustic monitoring | Photos | Hydrophone | SOFAR channel | Walter Munk | Walter Munk, the ‘Einstein of the Oceans’ | Waveform

Infrasound monitoring

0:54:08

Infrasound monitoring | Photos | Infrasound | Infrasound microphone is a barometer | Microbarometer

Radionuclide monitoring

1:01:10

Radionuclide monitoring | Photos | Radionuclide | Gamma spectroscopy | Gamma ray spectrometer | Natural radioactivity | Background radiation | Nuclear fission products | Xenon gas | Atmospheric Transport Modelling

Future sensing technologies

1:14:03

Geomagnetic field | Ionosphere | Satellite navigation

Communication infrastructure

1:20:21

Very-small-aperture terminal | Public-key cryptography

Data centre

1:23:55

Beamforming | CTBTO Waveform data processing and analysis | Confidence interval | CTBTO Radionuclide data processing and analysis