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New U.S. Radiation Scanners Could be Tested in 2007
Prototype radiation scanners developed by U.S. national laboratories for use at seaports could be tested next year in Nevada, the San Francisco Chronicle reported today (see GSN, April 21). U.S. scientists have been working for years to ready scanners able to detect with absolute accuracy radiation from a nuclear weapon or radiological “dirty bomb” being shipped by sea into the United States. Testing is anticipated in 2007 at the Radiological and Nuclear Countermeasures Test and Evaluation Complex, which is now under construction at the Nevada Test Site. One or more types of scanners could then be deployed at U.S. ports in a matter of years, the Chronicle reported. The Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Idaho national laboratories have been preparing different types of scanners. Among the challenges is developing technology that limits the number of false alarms while being able to defeat terrorists’ efforts to disguise weapons. “I think we’ve got something that works,” said Dennis Slaughter, a senior scanner developer at Lawrence Livermore in California. Scientists from Lawrence Livermore and a subsidiary of General Electric Co. are preparing a neutron scanner for next year’s planned tests. The machine would not be “a fundamentally new technique, but it’s a big step ahead. … It will enable us to find a far smaller needle in the haystack, so to speak — and to find it faster” than scanners now in use, said Joe Krisciunas, security programs manager for GE Global Research. Los Alamos in New Mexico is preparing technology that would scan for particularly dense materials within a container that could indicate efforts to shield a weapon from handheld radiation scanners. “If a person has a nuclear weapon surrounded with lead, we’ll see it” within one minute, said Los Alamos scientist Chris Morris. U.S. experts are also studying strategies to detect a nuclear bomb carried on an oil tanker, which could be used to foil neutron scanners, the Chronicle reported. “Neutrons sent into the oil and (neutrons) produced by the fissioning of uranium (in a concealed bomb) would be absorbed … or scattered by the hydrogen atoms in crude oil, and the large volume of oil would attenuate any gamma rays produced, defeating this form of detection,” the Congressional Research Service said in a February 2005 report. The question remains whether the scanners will be ready before terrorists obtain and use a nuclear or radiological weapon. “It’s a scary thought — and someday it’s going to happen,” Morris said. “All you can do is make it less probable. If you make the problem go from (a probability of) once every 10 years to once every 1,000 years, that’s a good thing” (Keay Davidson, San Francisco Chronicle, May 8).
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