Posted on 01/14/2004 10:40:42 AM PST by NewRomeTacitus
Every so often nature surprises us by offering a simple solution to a seemingly impossible problem. Now it seems that the great scourge of the 21st century, rogue nuclear weapons, also may yield to a natural remedy--sunlight.
Homeland security experts worry less about a repeat of the events of September 11 than they do the detonation of a crude nuclear weapon in a major city. Their nightmare scenario derives from two facts. The first is that the world is awash in dangerous nuclear materials. A small amount exists in the form of enriched uranium and plutonium--needed to make atomic bombs. More worrisome are the massive quantities, measured in tons, of medical and industrial waste that are seeping into the black market. Not long ago, the U.S. Department of Energy told Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns that Russian law enforcement personnel had stopped 250 shipments of radioactive materials. Wrapped around conventional explosives, this radioactive material produces fallout effects similar to, and in some cases worse than, those of a nuclear blast.
Many within the intelligence community are convinced that the ingredients for making rogue nuclear weapons are heading to the United States. Therein lies the second problem: There is no effective means to detect this lethal cargo.
Awash With Containers
"Across the country we handle over 2 billion tons of domestic and international freight, and the majority of that is moved in containers," says Sen. John Warner of Virginia. "New York and Virginia have a tremendous percentage of that freight, and the fact is not more than 2 percent of it is inspected."
The containers to which Warner refers are the common corrugated steel boxes you see each day on trains and trucks. Most begin their journey at a U.S. port, where they are offloaded from containerized cargo ships. "Eighteen million cargo containers enter the United States every year," says Arnaud de Borchgrave, a Senior Fellow for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Director of the Transnational Threats Initiative, a Washington-based think tank.
In congressional hearings, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have insisted they are doing a good job of monitoring what is inside these steel boxes. Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana suggests that the facts speak differently. "If we cannot stop tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, it does not breed a lot of confidence that we can stop all terrorists." Simply put, there are too few hands to carefully check each container. About 400 ships enter U.S. ports each day. Add to that a thousand or so official and unofficial roads and train tracks into the United States from Canada and Mexico. The danger is expected to escalate in the coming years. In late 2003, a new generation of containerized ships were launched from Korean and Japanese shipyards. Each is nearly as long as four football fields and can hold 8000 20-ft. containers. That is one-third more than the behemoths that now call at U.S. ports.
The Cosmic Connection
It is on this bleak picture that Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher Chris Morris has cast a genuine ray of light. At a recent visit to the New Mexico lab, Morris and his colleagues showed POPULAR MECHANICS the prototype of the machine that could provide a security blanket against both fission and radiological bombs.
The Earth is continuously bombarded by energetic stable particles, mostly protons. These cosmic rays originate from the stars. "The protons interact with the upper atmosphere to produce showers of short-lived particles called pions," Morris explains. Pions decay into other subatomic particles, called muons.
Muons are passing through your body as you read this. However, when muons strike very dense matter, like plutonium, uranium or the lead shielding used to absorb the radiation from these elements, the subatomic particles fly off at an angle.
More than 30 years ago, Morris began studying the way subatomic particles react when they strike massively dense metals. For this work, he built sensor panels that could note the precise place a muon struck the grid of sensors. Similar sheets of sensors below and around the object being studied tracked muons that passed straight through or were flung to the side.
The advantage of working with muons is that while they are plentiful as long as the sun shines, they are sufficiently rare, so each particle can be tracked as it moves through sensor grids. Too many scattered muons spell trouble. In one simulated test of real-world smuggling conditions, a radioactive object the size of a small nuclear bomb was loaded in a cargo container under layers of automobile differentials meant to disguise it. A computer calculated how the muons scattered. After 15 seconds it displayed the results. A mock bomb target appeared as a faint glow on a computer monitor. After 30 seconds, it lit up like a single bulb on a Christmas tree.
Morris estimates that 500 machines would be sufficient to check each vehicle crossing into the States from Mexico and Canada. Units placed at foreign ports would ensure that suspect containers don't leave home. The best part is that the system is completely passive. Cosmic rays are, after all, nothing more than sunlight from our own and distant stars.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Dumb question: What happens if the nuclear material is smuggled in after dark?
The only way I see it doing them any good (in asuaging the youth movement) is if they use it about the same time they develop it. Wonder what the better target would be for this: The U.S. or Israel? I'm thinking Israel for logistic reasons.
Not dumb; a very insightful question. I suppose they'd have to restrict border crossings/container unloadings to daytime hours or construct artificial muon generators overhead (if such a thing is possible).
They're on 24/7
The question isn't dumb at all (nor is the answer), however the problem turns out not to be quite as bad as you might think. The extract from the article mentions that muons are generated from sources other than the sun, but it doesn't mention that the other sources provide a significant contribution to the muon flux through the atmosphere. The effect is that there's a lot less difference between day and night than you'd expect from the difference between sunlight and starlight.
Actually one of the biggest sources appears to be the center of the galaxy ... which would have a similar problem to the location on the earth being turned away from the sun (galaxy rise/set?). However there are enough different sources that you should be able to come up with a predicted flux for each location based on the time of day and year etc. The flux never really goes to zero.
Well, see - there you go. Comments from knowledgable people are better, in this instance, than babbling from me. I'd just assumed that the relative distances between the sun and other stars would result in a big difference in magnitude.
That's why I was just a dumb 'ol mechanical engineer instead of a smart guy.
Maybe -- India has to worry about terrorist nukes from Pakistan. ;-)
I wouldn't be surprised to find if we already do exactly that.
This seems like a good thread in which to mention something I've been noticing for a while now.
I first saw it (or at least first noticed it) about five years ago, then have spotted similar occurrences with increasing frequency ever since, especially after 9/11. My suspicion has been that it might be "scanning" of the sort described here, or something similar.
The odd thing I'm talking about is helicopters (no, not black ones!) hovering perfectly motionless over major highways, dead center over the road, aligned with traffic (i.e. "looking" along the path of the road itself). Sometimes they have visible "instrument pods" or something dangling below them.
It's unlikely they're traffic copters, since those don't sit motionless for long periods, they just flit from one traffic bottleneck to another. And news copters are plainly marked and also tend to circle the objects of their interest looking for various camera angles.
In fact, it's odd for a helicopter to hover motionless for a long time, *period*. It takes a lot of fuel (i.e. money) to just "park" there, and most copters are either just on their way from point A to point B, or circle some point of interest for better views. Plus it must be a lot harder for a pilot to "freeze" the craft than to just cruise around free-form (more boring, too).
And I'm talking "staying parked there for as long as I can watch them", not just for a minute or two then moving on.
The only explanation I can think of is that they're "scanning" passing traffic, like a mobile "checkpoint", especially since I see "motionless" copters *only* perfectly centered and aligned over major roads, never over some other feature.
The first one I noticed was way in the middle of freaking nowhere between Dallas and Houston (which is why it caught my attention) over I-45, and was visible (and motionless) for the long period of time it took me to first be able to see it on the horizon (a *long* way away in that flat countryside), approach it, pass under it, then have it fade away in my rear view mirror. Bizarre, especially since there was nothing in the area except scattered farms -- and the traffic on the freeway. That's an odd spot to park a copter and burn a lot of fuel just to watch... cows?
Since then, I've been more alert to the behavior of copters I see "hanging around", and over the years I've spotted dozens, usually in metropolitan areas, but always over a major road, as motionless as possible, aligned with the freeway.
NEST scanner teams, perhaps? (NEST = Nuclear Emergency Search Team, a division of the US Department of Energy).
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