Slashdot Mirror
Program To Detect Smuggled Nuclear Bombs Stalls
Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that a program to detect plutonium or uranium in shipping containers has stalled because the United States has run out of helium 3, a crucial raw material needed to build the 1,300 to 1,400 machines to be deployed in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might try to deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enter the United States every year. Helium 3 is an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays — but the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989 after accumulating a substantial stockpile of Helium 3 as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons. 'I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,' says Representative Brad Miller, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem. Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. The Homeland Security Department has older equipment that can look for radioactivity, but it does not differentiate well between bomb fuel and innocuous materials that naturally emit radiation like cat litter, ceramic tiles and bananas — and sounds false alarms more often. In a letter to President Obama, Miller called the shortage 'a national crisis' and said the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years. With continuing concern that Al Qaida or other terrorists will try to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States, Congress has mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the US be inspected overseas."
The moon is covered in helium 3. There, we have to have a manned lunar colony in order to be safe from terrorists!
This is my sig.
Sure, this was foreseeable. But at the time nobody needed large quantities of this sort of radiation-detection gear, and nobody foresaw circumstances where we'd suddenly develop a huge demand for it. So when production was stopped, nobody saw the consequences as being any major problem.
I'm guessing there's also a shortage of Tritium which decays into Helium-3 with a half-life of 12 years. If you have enough Tritium around and wait long enough, you'll have fresh Helium-3. You can make more Tritium by exposing Lithium-6 to a high neutron flux like that found in nuclear reactors. The neutron splits the Li6 as LI6 + n => T + He4. Russia might have quite a bit of it laying around owing to the size of their nuclear arsenal that we could buy.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The purpose of the border check system was never to actually stop the flow of drugs, silly. It was to drive out as many small players as possible, and concentrate the market into a few well funded/armed cartels. In this way, bribes come in at the director/secretary/senatorial level in a quiet and efficiant manner. Skipping the middle man (i.e. the border guard/local sheriff) on the bribery chain keeps my smack nice n' cheap.
There's seriously a program aimed at developing and deploying a fleet of nuclear bomb detectors at every port in the United States?
What kind of ridiculous bullshit is this? Did someone at the DHS watch a few episodes of 24 to come up with this? It's movie-plot anti-terrorism at its absolute worst: imaging ridiculously specific scenarios and spending enormous amounts of money to guard against them.
As if a terrorist organization resourceful enough to obtain a *nuclear fucking weapon* would somehow have difficulty bringing it into the country. This is a nation into which several metric tonnes of cocaine and thousands of illegal immigrants are successfully smuggled every year, and someone imagines that they'll be able to erect a perfect wall to keep a few kilograms of metal out of the country?
What congressman's nephew is being paid to make these detectors?