Maritime securityDHS's ambitious nuclear radiation detection plan has its critics

Did you know that every day, seven days a week, about 500 radiation alarms sound at the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports? Port authority say this nuisance is only likely to grow as the federal government ratchets up the nation’s defenses. The Los Angeles Times’s Ralph Vartabeidan writes that over the past year, customs officers have begun scanning every container that enters the United States for traces of radioactivity. Not satisfied with that, the Bush administration has embarked on an ambitious technological effort to achieve a nearly leak-proof barrier. U.S. radiation monitoring equipment is running at eight foreign ports which ship goods to the United States and at about 450 border crossings and airports around the world. Under federal law, 100 percent of cargo arriving legally at U.S. borders by 2012 will be scanned abroad and then again at U.S. ports. More sophisticated monitors, costing billions of dollars, are now under development.

Federal officials envision a time when the United States will be surrounded, or ringed, by radiation monitors at ports, along isolated sea coasts, traveling the oceans, roaming highways in police cars, and even located at checkpoints and toll booths on routes into major cities — all connected to a central national command center and staffed around the clock. Scientists at DHS are calling the effort Manhattan 2. The fact is, nobody is sure that any system in the foreseeable future can keep out terrorist nuclear bombs with absolute assurance. Plutonium and highly enriched uranium, contrary to public perception, have low levels of radioactivity. With a bit of lead or other shielding material, no existing detector can find them. Moreover, many types of normal cargo — granite counter tops and ceramic vases, for example — emit out gamma radiation. “People think we are going to catch a terrorist bomb with these radiation monitors,” said Laura Holgate, a former Defense Department and Energy Department nuclear weapons expert now at the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative. “If we can’t catch people and drugs coming across our border, I have no confidence that we can create a seamless security perimeter for nuclear weapons.” Vartabeidan notes that the most recent flap involves the advanced spectroscopic portal, a $1.2-billion effort by the DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO). Production was stopped last month after allegations by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that federal program managers rigged testing to certify that the equipment worked as advertised and reports that the machines were not reliable. Representative Bart Stupak (D-Michigan), who has held a series of hearings into the radiation monitoring program, doubts that the new generation of monitors is better than the old. “The next generation of equipment will only be as good as the next salesman knocking on the door of the Department of Homeland Security,” Stupak said.