DHS Oversold Radiation Sensors, Report Says

A new Government Accountability Office report has raised more questions about the Homeland Security Department’s promotion of a $1.2-billion radiation detector program put on hold by Congress last year, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, July 18).

The new detectors are intended to eliminate the false alarms that have plagued existing devices.  Homeland Security said they would have a 95 percent detection rate for highly enriched uranium.

“What this next generation of detection equipment is going to let us do is make those determinations much more precisely, much more easily and much more quickly,” Chertoff said in 2006 while announcing contracts for the detectors.

Congress delayed the project when GAO auditors found that sensors tested by the Homeland Security Department had detection rates as low as 17 percent and never more than about 50 percent.  The auditors told Congress last week that the department had overstated the reliability of the machines in its report on the cost and benefits of the sensors and failed to follow its own guidelines to ensure the report was accurate and complete.

Senate homeland security committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) said that Congress would not green-light the project without first receiving details about the monitors.

“As DHS develops costly new technology critical to the nation's security, Congress must be able to rely on [the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office’s] claims about the technology,” Lieberman said in an e-mailed statement.  “DNDO's estimates of costs and benefits must be based on facts, not assumptions.  And, while taking into account the effects this technology will have on commerce, it must be based first and foremost on how best to prevent nuclear smuggling.”

Counterterrorism officials have considered radiation sensors at U.S. ports a key defense against attacks by nuclear and radiological weapons since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.  In that time, the government has spent $200 million on detectors that proved unable to distinguish nuclear devices from radiation from sources such as ceramic tiles and cat litter (Robert O’Harrow Jr., Washington Post, July 20).

In a separate project to begin scanning all cargo containers entering the country in oceangoing vessels by September 2009, seven radiation sensors valued at $200,000 each are now being installed at Port Everglades, Fla. and are expected to start operating by mid-August, the Miami Herald reported today.

“This is an enhancement to securing the borders and an enhancement to the various layers we have to detect potential threats that could be devised from some source of radiation,” said Zachary Mann, special agent and spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (Ina Paiva Cordle, Miami Herald, July 19).

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