Program To Detect Smuggled Nuclear Bombs Stalls 224
Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that a program to detect plutonium or uranium in shipping containers has stalled because the United States has run out of helium 3, a crucial raw material needed to build the 1,300 to 1,400 machines to be deployed in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might try to deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enter the United States every year. Helium 3 is an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays — but the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989 after accumulating a substantial stockpile of Helium 3 as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons. 'I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,' says Representative Brad Miller, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem. Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. The Homeland Security Department has older equipment that can look for radioactivity, but it does not differentiate well between bomb fuel and innocuous materials that naturally emit radiation like cat litter, ceramic tiles and bananas — and sounds false alarms more often. In a letter to President Obama, Miller called the shortage 'a national crisis' and said the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years. With continuing concern that Al Qaida or other terrorists will try to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States, Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas."
There's plenty on the moon! (Score:5, Insightful)
The moon is covered in helium 3. There, we have to have a manned lunar colony in order to be safe from terrorists!
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And we don't even have to man it! We can use clones and HALs with Kevin Spacey's voice.
-FL
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Oh wow.
I am SOOO trying to think of something clever to say that involves DHS, TSA, and my "radioactive banana".
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Do you think you could deliver that in car-analogy form?
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Do you think you could deliver that in car-analogy form?
1975 Camaro.
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>Do you think you could deliver that in car-analogy form?
F450 vs a Miata.
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No one petitioned a military judge to order his arrest.
It's illegal to speak out against things?
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Apparently it is, if you're in the military and the "things" you are speaking out against are the United States and/or its armed forces. Uniform Code of Military Justice, article 134: "GENERAL ARTICLE: Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital, of which persons subject to this chapter may be guilty, shall
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shh don't spoil his ignorace by letting him whine. we don't want people to believe they actually have freedom afterall.
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ROFLMAO, come on mods, he cant be serious.
No one is THAT stupid surely.
Then again whenever someone writes Barrack "Hussein" Obama you just never know if they are real paranoid right wing nutjobs, or just satirising them.
Words cannot describe how much I enjoy their terrified thrashing around now a decent intelligent black man is President. Fun times.
Foreseeable doesn't mean foreseen (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, this was foreseeable. But at the time nobody needed large quantities of this sort of radiation-detection gear, and nobody foresaw circumstances where we'd suddenly develop a huge demand for it. So when production was stopped, nobody saw the consequences as being any major problem.
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Is that because they hadn't seen The Sum of all fears yet?
Re:Foreseeable doesn't mean foreseen (Score:5, Informative)
Boron-10 lined proportional counters, fission chambers, boron trifluoride, lithium doped glass
To make a slashdot analogy, it's kind of like if all Debian developers caught swine flu and perished. Not a big deal, just move over to Ubuntu or Fedora.
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if all Debian developers caught swine flu and perished. Not a big deal, just move over to Ubuntu
Ummm...
Re:Foreseeable doesn't mean foreseen (Score:5, Informative)
If Debian just went poof, Ubuntu would still exist; it's just that the development cycle would likely take a serious hit. Either that or they'd pull a Linux Mint and completely rewrite everything to be based off of Fedora or something. Anyway to get this back on topic... The real problem with the Helium-3 shortage is Tritium which decays into Helium-3 over time. The government didn't anticipate needing truckloads of Helium-3 to detect nukes entering the country so not enough Tritium was stockpiled specifically to make Helium-3. We get most of the Helium-3 from our Hydrogen bomb stockpile which uses the Deuterium + Tritium fusion reaction. Since we didn't need much Helium-3 or Tritium, we didn't put the Li-6 + n => T + He4 reaction to good use but we can now. We also as the GP noted, have the option of using alternative detectors although their effectiveness may not be as high as Helium-3 based detectors. So in other words, it's an annoyance but not really the doom and gloom that the summary suggests.
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Wow, didn't even read the summary:
The Homeland Security Department has older equipment that can look for radioactivity, but it does not differentiate well between bomb fuel and innocuous materials that naturally emit radiation like cat litter, ceramic tiles and bananas — and sounds false alarms more often.
Other types of detectors work in nuclear power plants because nobody is trying to ship a boatload of coffee beans through the middle of a power plant.
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Nuclear instruments, like those sold by GE Reuter Stokes [gepower.com] and LND [lndinc.com] detect neutrons -- they infer the power of a reactor by measuring how many neutrons leak out of the reactor core. (They are calibrated by comparing the analog readout under a known power condition
Didn't Slashdot talk about this last year? (Score:2)
This could slow down other work (Score:2)
...like lung imaging. (Score:5, Informative)
Run 3He through a polarizer and feed it to someone in an MR scanner, and it lights up the airspace inside the lungs like a Christmas tree. Makes it dead easy to see ventilation defects (emphysema, etc.) and functional issues that are very difficult to spot with any other imaging technique. But Homeland Security Theater has jacked the price so high that even by medical-procedure standards it's prohibitively expensive.
We've spent lots of hours designing and building a reclamation system so that we can collect the stuff, one MOUSE lungful at a time, and pump it into cylinders which we'll ship back to the supplier for purification. Yes, the amount a MOUSE breathes in a study is expensive enough to justify reclamation.
We're also working on xenon imaging, which does some things almost as well as 3He, and some things better. It's still hideously expensive, but at least you can get it from the atmosphere, instead of painstakingly milking it from aging thermonukes.
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Rather than putting the 3He in the mouse, put the mouse in the 3He.
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Alas, when you mix 3He with oxygen, it starts depolarizing, fast. We've got to mix it on the fly, right before it goes into the mouse. It's tricky, but we've gotten the hang of it. (Royal "we" here; I'm just a data plumber.)
Re:...like lung imaging. (Score:4, Funny)
1 - If I were to suck on a baloon filled with 3He, what would be the resulting effect on the frequency response of my vocal chords?
2 - Same question as above, but replace "I" and "my" with "Mickey Mouse"
3 - If I were to breathe reclaimed Mickey Mouse 3He, would I gain supernatural powers and large ears?
4 - Have all those years on the steamboat given Mickey Mouse emphysema and does he have long to live?
Inquiring minds must know!
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However, the effect on the vocal cords is not chemical, it is physical. Because He is less dense than air, the vocal cords can vibrate faster in it than in air.
Since He3 is less dense than He4, the effect will be slightly increased.
Re:...like lung imaging. (Score:5, Informative)
If I were to suck on a baloon filled with 3He, what would be the resulting effect on the frequency response of my vocal chords?
Since it's about 25% less dense, it would make your voice go even higher than regular 4He. Especially if, right after you inhaled, we told you how much that lungful cost. (About $7k.)
That's another way xenon is superior. It makes your voice go low, not high, as it's much denser than air -- and it gets you stoned, too.
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Especially if, right after you inhaled, we told you how much that lungful cost. (About $7k.)
Don't worry, I borrowed a page from 42's playbook and didn't inhale...... ;)
Moderators don't know El Reg units... (Score:2)
0.4 Kevins (Score:5, Funny)
How do you get 0.4 Kevins? Is this some sort of midget? It's dangerously close to 0 Kevins.
My home town nearly went to zero Kevins back in 1978.
It was a particularly cold winter, and we were already down to 3 Kevins (due to their low popularity at the time).
Kevin Thomas had flown out to be with his son's family for a wedding and got stuck in Boston for a whole week due to the weather. 2 Kevins left.
Kevin Lemmer was rushed to the hospital during my shift. I still remember the call from the EMTs as the ambulance was rushing toward us. "It's Lemmer. He's in bad shape. Drove right into the fucking ditch." We called the time of death at 6:15 PM.
At 6:16, all eyes turned to room 2217. Kevin Spencer was 82 and on his death bed with leukemia. His family being Catholic, he had already been given his last rights. If he couldn't hold out until Kevin Thomas returned, we would be at zero Kevins. Sure, we had 4 perfectly healthy Calvins, but they're just not the same.
It was 7:15 when Carla Brooks and her husband James burst through the main entrance. "She's not due for 2 weeks!", James exclaimed. As the staff bustled around getting the Brookses settled, they exchanged darting glances with each other. This was their first child, and they wanted to keep the baby's sex a secret. Of course, in a small town, secrets don't get kept. Nearly all of the hospital staff new that the child about to rip open Mrs. Brooks was indeed a boy.
The delivery was routine, and Kevin Brooks was born healthy, if a tad underweight, at 10:52 PM. Kevin Spencer was pronounced dead at 10:54.
It was, as they say, a close one. Kevin Thomas arrived two days later, the weather having finally cleared up. To this day, we still rib him about it.
Cedar Falls is currently at 5 Kevins.
Re:0.4 Kevins (Score:5, Funny)
"You have the right to die silently. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you on Judgement Day. You have the right to an attorney, although the judge is already omniscient so it's fairly pointless. If you cannot afford an attorney on Judgment Day don't worry, neither can anyone else. If you understand these rights as they have been read to you then say 'amen'."
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Last rights?
Oh you mean last writes, no that doesnt seem rite either.
(-:
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Re:0.4 Kevins (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wired covered this one in Aug 2000 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html
Glad we got that covered. (Score:2)
Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas.
It's a good thing that it is impossible to place a container on a non-commercial vessel. It is also good that it is impossible to NOT ship a weapon in a large cargo container.
Re:Glad we got that covered. (Score:4, Interesting)
Will they inspect all trucks entering the US from Canada and Mexico?
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They'll probably try to slip through some legislation under the guise of doing exactly that to stop the "terrorists" then it'll be used to harass anyone trying to cross the border for whatever reason they can think of at the moment.
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You haven't tried crossing from BC to the US lately, eh?
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When we first put the detectors in here, the Canadian couldn't get a trash truck across the boarder for two weeks because of the radiation picked up. Finally they had to steam clean the trash trailers to get them through.
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This sounds like a huge fucking waste of time, and it won't be done seriously for more than the first 3 days or so. The amount of freight bound for the US has to be absolutely enormous.
inspected overseas. (Score:2)
inspected overseas
Date of scan - 24 Nov 2009
Results of scan - No radioactivity detected
Operator - Osama
impossible to NOT ship a weapon in a large cargo container.
Definitely. I'd be more worried by the ones that arrive under their own power :)
Hmmm... (Score:2)
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Goin' great Last Available Usern.
(Or should I say - "USAs all be an evil rat"?)
Your weapon... fun-sized... shipment of ura... American candy... will be arriving shortly.
nuclear reactors to the rescue (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing there's also a shortage of Tritium which decays into Helium-3 with a half-life of 12 years. If you have enough Tritium around and wait long enough, you'll have fresh Helium-3. You can make more Tritium by exposing Lithium-6 to a high neutron flux like that found in nuclear reactors. The neutron splits the Li6 as LI6 + n => T + He4. Russia might have quite a bit of it laying around owing to the size of their nuclear arsenal that we could buy.
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That's fine for small scale operations but what you're essentially suggesting isn't feasible on the larger scale that He-3 production will need to be. We've got enough reactors that we get 20% of our power from them and there's tons of neutrons being emitted with nothing better to do than make TRitium for us.
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Mckay had nearly driven her mad on the show as it was; could you imagine what would have happened if someone else as arrogant and annoying as myself were on the show as well? :)
Program To Detect Smuggled Nuclear Bombs Stalls (Score:2)
I have programs that stall all the time. Just run it under a debugger and you'll see why almost immediately.
Umm, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's seriously a program aimed at developing and deploying a fleet of nuclear bomb detectors at every port in the United States?
What kind of ridiculous bullshit is this? Did someone at the DHS watch a few episodes of 24 to come up with this? It's movie-plot anti-terrorism at its absolute worst: imaging ridiculously specific scenarios and spending enormous amounts of money to guard against them.
As if a terrorist organization resourceful enough to obtain a *nuclear fucking weapon* would somehow have difficulty bringing it into the country. This is a nation into which several metric tonnes of cocaine and thousands of illegal immigrants are successfully smuggled every year, and someone imagines that they'll be able to erect a perfect wall to keep a few kilograms of metal out of the country?
What congressman's nephew is being paid to make these detectors?
Re:Umm, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. It's not as though US law enforcement aren't being given insufficient tools for the job. Detention without charge, torture, no access to legal council for suspects, abductions of suspects from any country, mass surveillance without oversight, biometric controls at airports... Shouldn't the wholesale abandonment of liberty have bought you a bit of safety?
Phillip.
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Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Funny)
Actually it has.. major terrorist plots have been busted and prevented unneeded deaths because of these new tools.
I, for one am glad these tools are at their disposal. Its kept us safe, and that's all I care about. Even the Messiah Obama hasn't rescinded any of them so he knows they are worth the price.
Re:Umm, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personal speedboat goes out a couple miles. Bomb is loaded onboard. Boat comes back in and is towed to the final destination hitched to an SUV. Just in case, also put a few kilos of cocaine onboard. That way if the police find it they'll take it to the impound yard in a populated area.
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god dammit, stop posting shit like this, terrorists read slashdot.
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I saved all the good ideas. That was just the first thing off the top of my head. Anyone without a vested interest in the massive detector program would come up with it in an instant.
Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Funny)
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Or just ship it in a commercial container and detonate the thing in the port of Los Angeles, it's not like it's remote.
Re:Umm, what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it's impossible to load a bomb onto a ship while it is at sea.
And a nuclear bomb is so big it can't fit into a modest-sized sailboat of the kind that people have been known to sail around the world in. There are thousands upon thousands of such boats, and the rate of inspection of cargo is pretty much nil. So unless you're going to stop everyone crusing along your coasts and inspect them, no matter how small the boat, you're going to have to live with the risk that nuclear weapons will be delivered to your shores.
I'm sure the Organs of the State would love to institute a program of random coastal inspection. After all, harrassing innocent sailors is the only way to keep America safe, and the revenue they could generate from seizing yachts would no-doubt keep them in coke and hookers for a long, long time.
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Because it it totally impossible that a container could be added to a ship already at sea. I mean its not as if ships have cranes or anything.
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Politics. Some day, if something happens, someone might ask "why didn't we do this?" Fear of "common" sense.
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There's seriously a program aimed at developing and deploying a fleet of nuclear bomb detectors at every port in the United States?
What kind of ridiculous bullshit is this? Did someone at the DHS watch a few episodes of 24 to come up with this? It's movie-plot anti-terrorism at its absolute worst: imaging ridiculously specific scenarios and spending enormous amounts of money to guard against them.
As if a terrorist organization resourceful enough to obtain a *nuclear fucking weapon* would somehow have difficulty bringing it into the country. This is a nation into which several metric tonnes of cocaine and thousands of illegal immigrants are successfully smuggled every year, and someone imagines that they'll be able to erect a perfect wall to keep a few kilograms of metal out of the country?
What congressman's nephew is being paid to make these detectors?
Hey! I know you! You're the same guy who'll be bitching and screaming at the top of his lungs about how the government should have known a nuclear terrorist attack was in the works and how they should have done something to stop it.
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Actually, you don't. Know me, I mean.
welcome to science in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems we know how to do just about anything these days, but lack the ability to actually get it done
we require more vespene gas (Score:2)
maybe the koreans can help?
Another Crisis? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Another Crisis? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the consequence of giving anyone the position to make announcements and proclamations. Even without the government, night news would still be on at 6 to tell you that something IN YOUR HOME or AT SCHOOL or ON THE JOB can kill you!!!
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feck
on at 6 to tell you at 11.
National Crisis: America Needs Break, Urgently (Score:2)
another way to make tritium (Score:2, Interesting)
International Committee on Future Accelerators Beam Dynamics section newsletter abstract under the URL.
While the emphasis in the six articles is on transmutation of nuclear waste and accelerator driven nuclear power plants, the same accelerators can generate neutrons to breed tritium from lithium. The fusion demonstration ITER will have blanket with lithium to demonstrate breeding since its fuel is a deuterium-tritium mixture.
It would be lovely for the US accelerator community if the US DHS forked over $1.
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we don't need no steenkin' helium (Score:2)
large mass of plastic and scintillating material is all that's needed, someone is just making excuses
CANDU reactors (Score:5, Informative)
A byproduct of CANDU [wikipedia.org] reactors is Helium-3.
I'm not the first to note this, evidently [yahoo.com].
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CANDU [wikipedia.org]
That's the right attitude! ;-)
You show those "can't do" guys how it's done!
It stalled because... (Score:3, Funny)
Hey Wicked Cool! (Score:2, Interesting)
I just finished working on this project a year ago. I worked as a sub-contractor for Thermo-Fisher Scientific, one of the prime contractors, to DNDO, DHS, and CBP. It was an interesting project. My team was responsible for developing the command and control software for these systems. Had a lot of ups and downs. The technology works fairly well. We did A LOT of testing of the system in both laboratory and field conditions in order to validate the software. Got to travel to great and wonderous places like N
Re:Hey Wicked Cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
Say hello to expensive bananas (Score:2)
Serious physics question (Score:2)
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Perhaps D + D -> He-3 + n. There is no He-4 intermediate (a misconception). It is impossible for He-4 to be formed as D + D -> He-4, as there is only one particle on the right and this would violate either conservation of energy or momentum. In the "too much energy" interpretation you cite, it means that the fusion reaction releases 10's of MeV of energy into the fusion products' kinetic energies, but there is only one product (He-4), and it is at rest in one inertial frame, so there is no kinetic ene
Congress blocks progress again. (Score:2)
'I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,' says Representative Brad Miller, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem.
To some extent it wasn't foreseeable - this program is part of the fallout of 9/11. OTOH, we've had this program coming down the pike for years.
In reality, the DoE has been asking for funding to expand tritium production (for a wide variety of uses) since the mid 90's (correctly foreseeing that there would be a sho
Why bring a Nuke into the Country? (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't need to land the bomb to cause lots of damage. Anyone resourceful enough to get hold of a nuclear bomb will probably know about the detection system and the best risk avoidance is to detonate it before unloading. You could detonate it below the waterline (in the ship) or above ground (hoisted off deck by the port crane) to be as destructive as possible. No detection possible unless you scan cargo 20km offshore.
Tritium production is politically impossible (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry, I ate some of it. (Score:3, Funny)
Kids, don't trust the food just because the lady with the hairnet says it's OK. Get it checked out by one of the guys in the hazmat suits.
Waste Fraud and Abuse (Score:3, Insightful)
The NYT article says that the current demand for H3 is 65,000 liters per year. WTF!!!
I can't believe that so much H3 is needed for new screening machines. It must be true that the machines are leaking the H3 or contaminating it and thus needing to replenish it all the time.
If it were private industry rather than Homeland Security that wanted the screening function, the regulators would force them to refine the design until they need only one liter or less per machine, and then to protect the asset so that it never leaks or gets contaminated. One liter per ten years per screening machine sounds like a more reasonable quota.
I attribute this crisis to the inability of government to regulate itself.
By the way, I live on my sailboat and cruise internationally. I know that hundreds of thousands of recreational boats enter the USA every year. Every one of them is capable of carrying one or more nuclear warheads. Are these boats screened? No. In many cases they just call a 800 number to report their entry.
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Dogs are better at finding drugs than any scanner is at finding nuclear material.
Less expensive too.
Less training involved, too.
Less maintenance, too.
Cuter, too.
The war on drugs isn't meant to be "won", it is meant to be perpetually exacerbated to ensure the continued employment and empowerment of those waging it.
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They wouldn't want a reliable test for drugs, anyhow. Dogs are less reliable and more difficult to quantify.
Want to search a car? The dog "hit" on the car. Doesn't matter what the dog actually did, only matters what the K9 officer claims.
What, you're going to put the dog up on the witness stand?
The dog thing is yet another assault on the 4th amendment.
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Re:Ineffective waste of money (Score:4, Insightful)
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Except that lead containers show up just fine on other scanners they already use.
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The people charged with protecting the US against terrorism? They are evidently a little more concerned about such things than you are.
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"Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas."
Eh, what'll it matter. It'll only be in effect for a few months.
Oh great...
I'm sure it's easier to bribe officials or otherwise get around the inspections in somewhere like Namibia, Pakistan or the Philipines, rather than at the US port.
K.
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