Innovative Detection Methods May Help Tighten U.S. Security

Scientists at the UC-owned Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories announced ground-breaking research they said has the potential to eliminate a serious terrorist threat.

With $3.8 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, researchers have developed a way to detect nuclear and fissionable materials, the building blocks of atomic bombs, researchers said.

The researchers said they fear terrorists could smuggle materials to construct atomic bombs inside harmless-looking cargo containers, which are shipped on freighters throughout the world everyday.

"The amount of material that you need to create a weapon is about the size of a softball," said UC Berkeley nuclear engineering professor Stanley Prussin. "The problem we're trying to solve is how to find that inside a 20- to 40-foot long container."

Prussin said the potential damage of just a small atomic blast could be devastating.

"Consider what could happen in the aftermath with the country," Prussin said. "It has the potential of tearing apart the country."

In the past, security experts have tried to tackle the problem with traditional X-ray machines, but cargos are too dense and atomic particles could evade detection, Prussin said.

The team of nearly 20 researchers got to work after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which many said inspired them to act.

"It started with emotional anger," said Lawrence Livermore nuclear physicist Dennis Slaughter. "We are motivated by the notion that even if it's just one bomb found in a decade, it's worth it."

Slaughter immediately began to look for ways to detect the virtually invisible fissionable materials, working with his other physicists on weekends and nights.

But after just a few months, Slaughter quit his job to devote his career to finding a way to detect atomic bombs.

The team of researchers is preparing to begin testing of a laboratory prototype this month, which Slaughter hopes will be put to use in ports across the country in three years.

The detector will fire a beam of neutrons into the cargo containers to detect the high energy gamma rays that are emitted by the enriched particles that make up atomic bombs.

Prussin said although this new method to detect atomic particles is not the only way to sense an atomic bomb, it is the only current practical and cheap way that can be reproduced at a large scale.

Although the testing has only been done at a small scale, the scanner must be nearly free of errors-the government will not allow more than one false detection per 1,000 scans, Slaughter said.

Slaughter and his team said they hope to finish testing within the next two years and find a commercial partner to produce the scanners.

Prussin said having at least two scanners at most ports could be a reality by 2007.

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