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Sniffing Bombs With Mobiles.
Byline: Benjamin Sutherland
Cell phones could help locate dirty bombs or nuclear weapons by 'triangulating' the source of radiation as mobile owners go by.
What do bananas, smoke alarms, toilets and large granite buildings have in common? Like many objects, they're sufficiently radioactive to set off radiation detectors. Efforts since 9/11 to prevent the detonation of a dirty bomb--an explosive device designed to spread harmful or lethal radiation, as well as panic-- are plagued by the risk of false alarms, known as false positives. When 350,000 or so radiation-therapy patients in Europe and the United States can conceivably cause detectors to light up (if they get close enough), you know a solution is not going to be easy to find.
And it hasn't been. The current state of the art, "spectroscopic" detectors, can distinguish between the harmless beta rays given off by the potassium 40 in bananas and the very dangerous gamma rays given off by uranium and plutonium, which are used to produce nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons. But they're expensive. In the run-up to the Olympics, China bought many of the detectors, at $27,000 apiece, from the Beijing firm RAE-KLH Technologies to check people and vehicles entering the Olympic Village, airports and other venues. Such detectors are limited in that they can work only at choke points such as entrances to buildings or compounds: they resemble the large walk-through metal-detector gates used at airports. To search for dirty-bomb radiation at large calls for cheaper electronics technologies, which are now starting to become available.
One new technology uses surveillance cameras with sensors tuned to radiation. In June, Splinternet Holdings, a security firm in Norwalk, Connecticut, began "wrapping" buildings with radiation-detecting cameras that cost less than half as much as the RAE Portal. The detectors differentiate between benign and dangerous radiation as people enter and leave the building, a big help for organizations such as hospitals and research labs that are trying to prevent the theft of radioactive material.
Some researchers are incorporating everything needed to detect radiation on to computer chips, which are smaller and more reliable than sophisticated spectroscopic radiation detectors that have moving parts. The security firm eV Products in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, is already marketing a chip that's a cubic centimeter in size. In large volumes, the company says, the device would cost less than $50 each. eV Products has provided batch quantities of several hundred to classified U.S. government programs. Rick Smith, head of sales, says his government clients are handicapped by the desire to develop overly complex systems able to identify biological and chemical threats as well. Such requirements would add years of research, and result in larger, ...
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Source: HighBeam Research, Sniffing Bombs With Mobiles.