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In the HBO series Chernobyl, they keep dumping sand on top of the reactor and worrying about it melting down into the groundwater. They said they had no way of telling what was happening in the core.

Wouldn't it have been possible to get the state of the core by monitoring neutrinos? The soviets seem to have had reasonable research into neutrinos at that point. They had detected neutrinos in 1959?

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    $\begingroup$ I'm no expert, but I imagine that proving that you can detect neutrinos from a source that you can turn on and off at will would be a whole different problem from proving that the neutrinos that you are detecting come from this particular steady-state source, instead of from the Sun or, from any other nuclear power station on Earth. $\endgroup$
    – Solomon Slow
    Commented Aug 17, 2020 at 15:27

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Because neutrinos almost never interact with matter, the detectors needed to sense and count them via those interactions have to be truly gigantic in order to generate any sort of useful signal. Those detectors also have to be extremely well-shielded to reduce the background noise from non-neutrino sources, which would trip the detectors and generate false signals that would swamp out the real signals. Such big detectors take years to construct and are buried deep underground for shielding; there is no technology that would allow a portable and small neutrino detector to be built and moved into place quickly.

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    $\begingroup$ Had they already been running reactor neutrino experiments in place, like RENO, KamLAND, Chooz, Daya Bay, etc, yes, they might have noted enhanced signals. But that reactor blew up before such experiments had been envisioned. $\endgroup$
    – Cosmas Zachos
    Commented Aug 17, 2020 at 18:58

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