[Citizen Tom Paine]

Question for some of you technical guys out there. If one wanted to detect Plutonium while driving around in a vehicle, what type of detection device would one use? Would it be a neutron detector? Are they portable?

[ovrtaxt]

If one wanted to detect Plutonium while driving around in a vehicle, what type of detection device would one use? Would it be a neutron detector? Are they portable?

Errr, umm, space modulator?

[JB in Whitefish]

“Question for some of you technical guys out there. If one wanted to detect Plutonium while driving around in a vehicle, what type of detection device would one use? Would it be a neutron detector? Are they portable?”

Indeed, YES...!!!

[Acme Plutonium Detector, $129.95 - comes with personalized headphones and search wand]

[RoadGumby]

Hey Tom,

Neutron detectors, while portable can be heavy. And their effiency/accuracy is not the best. A better meter would a gamma detector, as these transuranics, while they do emit neutron, also emit gamma.

[DBrow]

You’d use a gamma spectrometer and look for particular spectral lines. Most likely based on a scintillator crystal and sensitive light detector. They are commercially available, google up isotope identification.

If you use neutrons, you’d probably use an external neutron source to probe the vehicle and look for neutrons with a different energy coming out.

There are gamma detectors here and there on the road and in airports, but I don’t think anyone’s been brave enough to ping cars with neutrons just yet.

[Sender]

For info on how people and vehicles can be scanned, see this site.

For something you can carry around, just Google "portable radiation detector", there are many.

[oldstyle81]

Plutonium gives off much more radiation than Uranium and thus makes it more likely to be detected. Plutonium also needs much thicker shielding otherwise the people working on it would be fried by the material