Westinghouse files patent for nuclear detector that overcomes lead shielding

Despite the ongoing fuss over whether the United States should screen all imported cargo for nuclear devices — this is now to be done, at American but not neccesarily foreign ports — little attention is being paid to a critical vulnerability in the technology used to do so. As anyone who has ever been to the dentist knows, radioactivity has a hard time moving through lead, and so a determined terrorist might bulk up his package by encasing it in that substance, making X-ray-based approaches futile. Westinghouse Electric — sold last month to Toshiba for $5.4 billion — believes it has a solution to the problem, and has filed a patent detailing its approach.

Westinghouses’s “nonintrusive method for the detection of concealed special nuclear material” propels deutrons into tritium in order to generate a powerful beam of nuetrons that can slip through lead and excite hidden radioactive material. That “fast fission” excitement in turn results in an extremely abrupt echo, one so short that there is no risk of a dangerous chain reaction. A silicon carbide semiconductor sensor, switched on and off between beam pulses, gives intant warning if radioactivity is detected.

-read more in this Westinghouse patent application