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New Neutron Scatter Camera to Detect Smuggled Nukes
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 26, 2007 02:15 PM
from the size-matters dept.
from the size-matters dept.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in California are developing a new neutron scatter camera that they claim will be able to detect radiation through much more shielding and at much greater distances than traditional tech. "The neutron scatter camera consists of elements containing proton-rich liquid scintillators in two planes. As neutrons travel through the scintillator, they bounce off protons like billiard balls. This is where "scatter" comes into play -- with interactions in each plane of detector elements, the instrument can determine the direction of the radioactive source from which the neutron came. [...] Computers record data from the neutron scatter camera, and using kinematics, determine the energy of the incoming neutron and its direction. Pulse shape discrimination is employed to distinguish between neutrons and gamma rays."
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Ahh more justifications for fusion research (Score:4, Interesting)
To clarify (Score:3, Interesting)
Expected outcome (Score:4, Interesting)
2. DoD contractor requests $50M for additional research and receives it
3. DoD contractor delivers the detector as a proprietary black box, running Windows, at a price of $10M each. 50 units are ordered by the government.
4. 5 CalTech students make a working detector for $20'000 out of an old scintillation counter, plumbing pipe, and a PentiumIII machine running BSD.
5. Nobody cares.
I wish nobody cared (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong being able to detect a nuke is a good thing. However, to me this seems to fit right in along with the whole security theater schtick that the government is pulling. Throw out some nifty vaporware. Have some conveniently thwarted plots and you have a carte blanche to do whatever you want with personal liberty.
Without ge
Re:I wish nobody cared (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the whole point of having devices like this, is that, if you can directly detect somebody trying to smuggle in a nuke or even a backpack bomb, you don't need to spy on the whole country because you are afraid someone might.
Advances such as these should be trumpeted, as much as possible, to indicate that we don't need to have our civil liberties trampled in order to defend ourselves. That is, defending against terrorism is something for grad students to work on with big defense grants, not, a bunch of jackasses that want to play rent-a-cop at the CIA.
Parent
Not the point of this research (Score:2)
That is actually not the point of devices like this. The point of this device is to keep the federal funds flowing to Sandia researchers. This is because the researchers are interested in fusion research to provide cheap power to the world, but the government has always only cared about nukes and national security. So researchers are occasionally forced t
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But surely we still need to spy on the whole country, so we know when the Bad Guys have learned to get nukes past our nuke detectors?
Although, the big mushroom cloud in the parking lot might clue us in.
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See, I don't think that at all. I think people will be like, geez, why do I have to do all of this search crap, when all ya need to do is buy a scanner. Really, the RADAR gun used by police to catch speeders is the appropriate metaphor.
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And it isn't... How?
This, accompanied with "clueless" and "tinfoil hat" pretty much sums up your whole reply. Increasingly when I read comments on security - as soon as I see the buzzword[s] "security theatre" tossed out, it's prima facie evidence that the writer thereof has no fucking clue what he is t
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1. 5 engineering students and one professor make a working prototype for under $20k
2. DoD contractor requests $50m to productize the research
3. 2 grad students (part of the original 5) improve the design as a product funded (Maybe $100k) by aformentioned DoD contractor
4. The university and contractor get a co-patent
5. The DoD contractor sells the $10k units for $10m to the US government. The university gets a 10% cut. The grad students get a $375/month student loan bill over 3
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using your logic:
100% of our security budget should go towards death prevention since 100% of people will die at some
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Now, now. No point in dropping to the level of personal attacks.
Now back to your logic. That is a tired
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A Lesson in (abuse of) Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
You fail to understand statistics. The 150k strokes a year is a large statistical sample and thus it is easy to predict the number from one year to the nect with some degree of statistical accuracy.
Now consider the nuclear case. There have been zero incidents since nuclear weapons existed in man-portable form, say 20 years ago. Now assuming a poisson distribution of events this means that we can conclude with a 95% confidence level that the rate of such events is less than 3.09 per 20 years i.e. less that a roughly 15.4% probability per year. Assuming that such an event would kill 1 million people this means that we are only 95% certain that the annual death rate from such terrorism is less than the death rate from strokes.
However the above is a conservative estimate because technology is making it easier to build nuclear weapons so whereas the above calculation assumed a constant probability distribution of such events that is not correct and it is getting more and more probable. So really we are less than 95% certain. In addition comparing the death rate is not a fair statistic. A better comparison would be years of human life lost. A majority, but certainly not all, stroke victims are old or have recently suffered other life threatening conditions like a heart attack or aneurism. However a terrorist bomb would kill children as much as the elderly (and everyone in between).
So while you cannot show that this is the most effective way of spending money to save life neither can you show that it is not. However given the uncertainties in any such calculation it is far from a total waste of time which is what you were suggesting.
Parent
Re:Expected outcome (Score:4, Interesting)
1. DoD contractor delivers working unit, thoroughly stress tested in the real world, has ability to mass produce unit quickly with solid quality control.
2. CalTech students produce one for cheap that supposedly works in their lab, then graduate and go to work for DoD contractor and get paid six figures.
Parent
Federally funded labs and research priorities (Score:2, Interesting)
Not really the case, these are feigned interests (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Not really the case, these are feigned interest (Score:2)
Are you sure you belong here? Judging by your user Id, I'm guessing your brains haven't yet been rotted by hot grits. You may want to run while there's still time.
Re:Not really the case, these are feigned interest (Score:2)
We see how that worked out.
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Besides being limited by the amount of funding available, fusion research has been hindered by various complex interactions that were not originally known about. With greater understanding comes greater control. The ends will ultimately justify the means.
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A parallel example is Japanese aircraft in WWII. Right up to the surrender they were developing better and better fighters/interceptors. Yet their primary bomber - the 'Betty
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Space Age, now Terrorist Age? (Score:2)
Something that might be worth considering is that a lot of other uses (good or bad) tend to spin off research in one particular field. How many commonplace technologies today are credited with being derived from aerospace research (i.e. "Space Age" technologies)? Though more ominous sounding, there's a number of useful tech ideas that may result from such counter-terrorism research as well. I would agree however, that I'd prefer the primary focus of the initial research to be on something with a more no
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I am just indicating exactly what the parent already stated. Once the technology is created it is
"Smuggled"?? (Score:2)
IANA[Nuclear Arms Dealer], but this seems more meant to detect the locations of nukes in established na
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Either way you're likely to see some serious retaliation, so why not tak
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...it seems to me that generally a terrorist involved in a destructive act has as a main goal the largest body count they can manage.
I don't think you're basing this on any actual data or observations. I know that this is what we're told on a regular basis, but it just doesn't jive.
It doesn't take very long to come up with some scenarios with a much-higher body count than we've seen thus far due to terrorism. Biological agents in the water supply comes to mind. I'm sure there are tons of others.
None of these have been attempted yet, and I suspect there is a good reason for it. Personally, I look to the name - 'terrorism' implies th
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Why would you even need to smuggle it? A terrorist worth his salt could highjack a cargo ship without anyone know it, sail up into NYC harbor, get as close as possible to the docks (and or downtown) and then just detonate it as their about to be boarded by the authorities when they notice something is amiss.
If they needed something further inland, they could construct a crude ballistic missile and launch it from a ship.
First Strike Tech. (Score:2)
[I did not read the article.]
smuggled OUT, not in (Score:2)
Yes but..... (Score:2)
How scintilating (Score:3, Funny)
That kind of hot geek talk gets my protien rich liquid scintillator scintillated.
Difficult to conceal? (Score:2)
While some gamma rays can be blocked from detectors, neutrons are much more difficult to conceal. In a lab test, the camera easily detected and imaged a source placed across the hallway, through several walls and cabinets.
I'm not a physicist, but I do know that slow neutrons are easily blocked by a several common elements like boron and hydrogen (I know there are more, but it's been a while). Shields can be easily built with a mixture of boron and wax, even a Google search for "neutron shield" returns products ready to buy. I'm not in any knowledgeable position to comment on the effectiveness of this device, but if it becomes widespread, wouldn't it be trivial for a large, evil entity hiding smuggled nuclear materials to in
Basic question about neutron detection (Score:2)
Pity... (Score:2)
The technology doesn't matter (Score:2)
As a local LA radio personality put it: They don't have the manpower to check the ports out because all the cops are working undercover at the
Local Expert Chimed In (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's hope that isn't true, and places like Sandia are working on making nuetron detection less expensive.
Some background (as it were...) (Score:4, Insightful)
What has been done here is fairly clever, although I'm doubtful as to the ultimate viability due to low cross-sections and high backgrounds and easy work-arounds by the bad guys.
Spontaneous fission produces fast neutrons, which are relatively hard to shield against. First they have to thermalize, then get captured. Things that are good at shielding gamma rays (heavy elements) are lousy at thermalizing neutrons (light elements), so it makes the bad guy's shielding problems harder to solve.
Ergo, if you can detect fast neutrons, and determine where they are coming from, you have a backup bomb detector that is harder to beat. The way Nick is proposing to do this is with a setup in which you have two planar liquid scintillator detectors and look for coincidences (suitably delayed by the neutron's quite significant travel time) between them. Fast neutrons deposit energy into the detectors via proton recoil, which creates a distinct kind of optical event from electron-positron showers produced by gamma rays. Furthermore, you tend to get forward scattering, so you can at least tell which hemisphere the neutron originated from, most of the time.
The data analysis is tricky, the neutron detection rates will be low, and if I was designing this I'd go for a thick secondary detector and count on thermalization and capture to create the secondary signal, rather than having a thin secondary detector looking for another recoil event. With a segmented detector or similar you'd be able to still do a reasonable job of the kinematics.
Discriminating against cosmic ray neutrons is going to be painful for this technology, however, and furthermore the comment that another poster made that "this tech shows we don't need to give up our civil liberties to be safe because it proves we can catch stuff at the boarder" is to my mind utterly wrong-headed. It assumes the border can be made perfectly impermeable, and that is simply not the case, as a million kilos of grass or whatever it is a year proves. As long as there is a chance that one bad guy can slip something through, Americans have two choices: be willing to die for your freedom, or give up your freedom (and be willing to die anyway, because a police state will not protect you.)
Final thought: we used to joke, back in the day, that we could sell our detector design to the U.S. navy as a means of detecting stationary nuclear submarines (it took a couple of days for useful neutrino statistics to build up when the prototype detector was about 10 m from a reactor core.) It looks like Nick might have found a way to do something very close to that after all...
nothing focuses the mind like a deadline (Score:3, Interesting)
How long? let's see. if they're "developing" it now, say 3 years until it's in production and another year until it's at the major points of entry. But you've got to cover all the points of entry - sea, air(freight), land via Canada and Mexico. Make that about 10,000 PoE in all, so you're talking about another couple of years at least. That means about 6 years or until the beginning of 2014 to get a few grapefruit sized pieces of metal across the border.
Really bad thought: maybe it would be easier to get material that's already in US stockpiles - what use are border checks then?
Smuggling nukes is uneccessary (Score:2)
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Most of our major ports don't even screen until after the ship is unloaded.
And forget about screening at regional ports.
Never send a Red to do a decent security job - only a Blue will do.
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This Reads: 'fancy new-fangled oceanic Shipping Container Nuke Detector' all over it, and maybe something new for surveillance aircraft too.
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So in order for these to be effective you only need (19000 * 100)/2 = 950,000 of these things arranged at 10m intervals around the country and you're completely safe. Unless the terrorists use airplanes.
What makes people think that a device has to be smuggled into the country to be effective? If something big went off in a vessel in the port of New Yo
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No, the range of these neutrons is pretty short. If unshielded and unscattered - a few hundreds of yards in free air. Or, in practice, a few tens of feet at best. I think you are