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New Neutron Scatter Camera to Detect Smuggled Nukes
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in California are developing a new neutron scatter camera that they claim will be able to detect radiation through much more shielding and at much greater distances than traditional tech. "The neutron scatter camera consists of elements containing proton-rich liquid scintillators in two planes. As neutrons travel through the scintillator, they bounce off protons like billiard balls. This is where "scatter" comes into play -- with interactions in each plane of detector elements, the instrument can determine the direction of the radioactive source from which the neutron came. [...] Computers record data from the neutron scatter camera, and using kinematics, determine the energy of the incoming neutron and its direction. Pulse shape discrimination is employed to distinguish between neutrons and gamma rays."
This is part of the problem with working under government contracts on projects and interests that are ultimately unrelated - you always have to justify the research. I worked in this department at Sandia for a few summers, and that was generally the opinion I heard. Everyone there is interested in fusion research to provide cheap power to the world, but they have to do this research under the auspices of supporting national security or nuclear stockpile stewardship. Everyone working there knows that that's not the actual reason for the research, but it keeps the funds flowing in.
Don't get me wrong being able to detect a nuke is a good thing. However, to me this seems to fit right in along with the whole security theater schtick that the government is pulling. Throw out some nifty vaporware. Have some conveniently thwarted plots and you have a carte blanche to do whatever you want with personal liberty.
Well, the whole point of having devices like this, is that, if you can directly detect somebody trying to smuggle in a nuke or even a backpack bomb, you don't need to spy on the whole country because you are afraid someone might.
Advances such as these should be trumpeted, as much as possible, to indicate that we don't need to have our civil liberties trampled in order to defend ourselves. That is, defending against terrorism is something for grad students to work on with big defense grants, not, a bunch of jackasses that want to play rent-a-cop at the CIA.
This is my sig.
Okay, let's see here...strokes kill about 150000 people each year in the U.S., and the government spends about $400 million on stroke research. Terrorists with radioactive materials have killed approximately zero people ever, and the government spends $650 million+ on (admittedly clever) directional radiation detectors. Yeah, we're clearly doing a great job of rationally allocating our money.
You fail to understand statistics. The 150k strokes a year is a large statistical sample and thus it is easy to predict the number from one year to the nect with some degree of statistical accuracy.
Now consider the nuclear case. There have been zero incidents since nuclear weapons existed in man-portable form, say 20 years ago. Now assuming a poisson distribution of events this means that we can conclude with a 95% confidence level that the rate of such events is less than 3.09 per 20 years i.e. less that a roughly 15.4% probability per year. Assuming that such an event would kill 1 million people this means that we are only 95% certain that the annual death rate from such terrorism is less than the death rate from strokes.
However the above is a conservative estimate because technology is making it easier to build nuclear weapons so whereas the above calculation assumed a constant probability distribution of such events that is not correct and it is getting more and more probable. So really we are less than 95% certain. In addition comparing the death rate is not a fair statistic. A better comparison would be years of human life lost. A majority, but certainly not all, stroke victims are old or have recently suffered other life threatening conditions like a heart attack or aneurism. However a terrorist bomb would kill children as much as the elderly (and everyone in between).
So while you cannot show that this is the most effective way of spending money to save life neither can you show that it is not. However given the uncertainties in any such calculation it is far from a total waste of time which is what you were suggesting.