Do-it-yourself Nuclear Detector Patrols San Francisco Harbor
Posted by StormWarning on 24 Aug 2006 at 02:55 pm | Tagged as: Current Affairs, National Security, Opinions, Technology
Port security and the detection of nuclear weapons has been a subject of interest both here and elsewhere. Congress and Port Security and Port Security and Nukes.
Also, the DHS recently awarded contracts to three companies, Raytheon Company – Integrated Defense Systems, Thermo Electron Corporation, and Canberra Industries, Inc. have been awarded contracts with one base year and four one-year options. The contracts include cost-plus award fee options to cover engineering and development activity as well as firm fixed price options for hardware purchases. The priority for the base year is development and testing of the fixed radiation detection portal that will become the standard installation for screening cargo containers and truck traffic.
But now for the "fun." While the government process "moves" ahead (ready in 2011), an ad-hoc group of scientists have apparently developed a working radiation detector. From the Homeland Security Daily Newswire we find this:
Tinkering is a fine scientific tradition. Often a commercial product can not reach its potential until those who have to use it on a daily basis have the chance to figure out how to make it work best on the ground. What if the tinkerers come up with the product themselves, however? It is happening right now in San Francisco with a group of volunteers led by physicist and Sandia Lab weapons subcontractor Stanley Glaros that claims to have built a boat-mounted radiation scanner for less than $12,000 per unit using off-the-shelf parts. Compare this to the $300,000 to $600,000 cost of monitors DHS recently ordered from Raytheon, Thermo Electron, and Canberra Industries, and one can see that the spirit of Edison is alive and well.
Detecting radiological threats is a tricky business. Typically, a container is either pushed through a radiation portal monitor, or a straddle carrier drives over it. Both systems, however, contain a certain danger: once a nuclear or radiological device is available to be tested, it is also in a prime position to be detonated, destroying or rendering inoperable the port and its environs. Better to bring the detector to the boat while its it still far enough away that the effects of a premature explosion can be mitigated and contained. A boat-mounted detector sounds ideal, especially if the price is right.
The Glaros group’s detector uses the same technology–a four inch by four inch by sixteen inch sodium iodide crystal–already deployed in many radiation monitors, including the new advanced spectroscopic portals DHS is now purchasing. "The crystal is like Frodo’s sword," explained a Glaros collaborator, referring to a Lord of the Rings hero. "It starts to glow when the bad stuff’s around, kind of a blue fluorescence." According to Wired magazine, "the crystal’s blue glow is picked up by an Ortec Digibase photo-multiplier, collected into dynodes, converted to a signal and then run through a multichannel analyzer to identify radiological signatures, which are then fed to a laptop where a Maestro 32 computer program compares them against an isotope database."
With their scanner mounted on a borrowed San Francisco Police Department patrol boat, Glaros and his team of volunteers have been trolling San Francisco Bay shipping lanes for eight months. They plan to publish their findings soon in the Review of Scientific Instruments.
- According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there were 650 cases of illicit trafficking of nuclear and radiological materials worldwide between 1993 and 2004. As of February, 75 percent of U.S. ports had no ability to screen for nuclear weapons and only 5 percent of the 11 million containers were inspected at all, DHS records show.
- The freelancers began by running a San Francisco Police Department patrol boat around local shipping lanes while using a common 1-inch-diameter Ranger sodium iodide detector to measure the background radiation at 23 separate locations, from the San Francisco Lightship Buoy down into the Oakland container docks and the Richmond oil docks.
So, will the race belong to the inventiveness of American science or to a government contract?
Current Affairs, National Security, Opinions, Technology
“So, will the race belong to the inventiveness of American science or to a government contract?” - storm
No contest. The better solution will (has?) come from the freelance inventors. However, the bloated overpriced contracts will go to whoever can get the pork earmarked into their district’s corporate contributors.
Great post. As I am looking at San Francisco bay out the window of my condo as I write this, I actually feel somewhat safer knowing these guys are out there patrolling the Bay. Very cool. I want to go find them and buy ‘em a beer.
MW: Please remember that the standing policy is that there are no earmarks in the budget for the DHS…none.
Nice post. Yes, the spirit of Edison is alive among the public but hacking and coughing its last few breaths in DHS.
One thing you can be sure about is that if a ton of radioactive material was detected in a van with half a dozen armed Middleastern men, between 17 and 40, with beards and armed with maps, weapons, letters of instructions from bin Laden, and suicide notes; the first thing the FBI would do is hold a press conference to deny any link to terrorism.
I simply don’t share your lack of trust of the federal government or the FBI.
“MW: Please remember that the standing policy is that there are no earmarks in the budget for the DHS…none. ” - sw
That’s right. I remember now. The task of allocating pork in the DHS budget has been pulled from Congress, and is now in the exclusive domain of the executive branch. - MW
Pork? Aside from anything else, that Washington Post article is primarily about the UASI grant program.
In the more general sense, the “pork” I referred to is when a Congressman or Senator writes into a budget an allocation for a project promoted by a company is his/her district. For the most part, technology programs like the radiation detector would be promoted as such if there was no “porkless” provision. The White House has nothing to do with these decisions. As it stands now, technology projects are competed through HSARPA on BAA’s.