Slashdot Mirror
Muon Detector Could Thwart Nuclear Smugglers
Ben Sullivan writes "Cosmic rays that bombard Earth could help catch smugglers trying to bring nuclear weapons into the U.S. Los Alamos scientists say they've developed a detector that can see through lead or other heavy shielding in truck trailers or cargo containers to detect uranium, plutonium or other n-bomb materials. Their technique, muon radiography, is reportedly far more sensitive than x-rays, with none of the radiation hazards of x-ray or gamma-ray detectors now used at border crossings. From Science Blog."
Of COURSE they're going to have this on the news and general media...they will certainly play up "hey, we have detection equipment so sensitive that it picked up on someone getting radiation treatment".
It's a propaganda tactic, play up that they can detect almost anything to make the bad guys think twice in trying to slip something in undetected. Since plutonium etc is hard to get as it is, perhaps the bad guys wouldn't want to risk losing it so easily (the risk here is losing the plutonium, not "getting caught" as human life means nothing to them as they've shown over and over).
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Regardless of how harmful these muons are when passing through your body, there is certainly no *added* harm in this detection method, because the muons used are the ones from space that has passed through you anyhow.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Remember when they couldn't find that lost nuclear weapon right off our shoreline for, like, damn near years? Inpenetrable detection net my ass. There could be a lot of material moving in and out and we might never know it.
The same people who buy that silly SDI crap believe this too.
The natural move from my point of view is to look at mu-N interactions, where a muon blows apart a nucleus in the target material, producing a shower of excited nuclear fragments and neutrons. Heavy materials such as plutonium will have a much different cascade signature than relatively light things like iron, so it may be possible to develop a quite specific finger-printing mechanism that would be hard to work around. With a muon detector on top to act as a trigger, and some combination of gamma and neutron detectors nearby, this is might be able to both speed up processing and improve accuracy dramatically.
Of course, terrorists could always fall back to the obvious plan B: smuggling the weapon in hidden in a bale of marijuana.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.