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Nuclear Bomb Detectors Stopped by Material Shortage
The Department of Homeland Security has spent $230 million to develop a better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear bombs but has had to stop deploying the new machines because the United States has run out of a crucial raw material, experts say.
The department had planned a worldwide network using the new detectors, which were supposed to spot plutonium or uranium in shipping containers.
The government wanted 1,300 to 1,400 machines, which cost $800,000 each, for use in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enters the United States every year.
The ingredient is helium 3, an unusual form of helium, that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays. But the government stopped making tritium in 1989, and the number of h-bombs has been decreasing.
“I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,†said Representative Brad Miller of North Carolina, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem. An official from the Homeland Security department testified last week before his subcommittee, the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the House Science Committee, that demand for helium 3 appeared to exceed supply by tenfold.
In fact, said Mr. Miller, some government agencies did anticipate a crisis, but Homeland Security appears not to have gotten the message.
At the White House, Steven A. Fetter, assistant director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that the problem was short-term because other technologies would be developed. But, he said, while the government had a large surplus of helium 3 at the end of the cold war, “people should have been aware that this was a one-time windfall, and was not sustainable.â€
Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. Homeland Security 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 kitty litter, ceramic tiles and bananas, and sounds false alarms more often.
Earlier this year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, part of the Energy Department, said in a report, “No other currently available detection technology offers the stability, sensitivity, and gamma/neutron discrimination†of detectors using helium 3.
Helium 3 is used to detect neutrons, the sub-atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction in a bomb or a reactor. Plutonium, the favorite bomb-making material of most governments with nuclear weapons, intermittently gives off neutrons, which are harder for a smuggler to hide than other forms of radiation.
(Detecting the alternative bomb fuel, enriched uranium, is a separate, difficult problem, experts say.) Helium 3 is rare in nature, but the Energy Department accumulated a substantial stockpile as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons.
Those weapons use tritium, which is the form of hydrogen used in the H-bomb, but the hydrogen decays into helium 3 at the rate of 5.5 percent a year. For that reason the tritium in each bomb has to be removed, purified and replenished every few years. It is purified by removing the helium 3.
The declining supply is also needed for physics research and medical diagnostics.
The Energy Department used to make tritium in reactors at its Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C., but those were shut after many operational problems.
It enlisted the Tennessee Valley Authority to make some tritium in a power reactor, using the same method it had used at Savannah River, breaking up another material, a form of lithium, with neutrons. One of the fragments is tritium. But that project has run into technical problems as well.
Canadian power reactors make tritium as a byproduct of power production, but they do not bother separating the helium 3. A spokesman for Ontario Power Generation said his company had had preliminary discussions with the Department of Energy, but that his company “hasn’t made a decision on whether this is a business we want to get into.â€
The helium-3 problem is another symptom of the decline of nuclear technology. The United States is also facing a shortage of medical isotopes that were plentiful in previous decades, because the production reactors have become old and unreliable.
Mr. Miller estimated that demand for helium 3 was about 65,000 liters per year through 2013 and that total production by the only two countries that produce it in usable form, the United States and Russia, was only about 20,000 liters. In a letter to President Obama, he called the shortage “a national crisis†and said that the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years, which threatens scientific research.
The Department of Homeland Security has spent $230 million to develop a better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear bombs but has had to stop deploying the new machines because the United States has run out of a crucial raw material, experts say.
The department had planned a worldwide network using the new detectors, which were supposed to spot plutonium or uranium in shipping containers.
The government wanted 1,300 to 1,400 machines, which cost $800,000 each, for use in ports around the world to thwart terrorists who might deliver a nuclear bomb to a big city by stashing it in one of the millions of containers that enters the United States every year.
The ingredient is helium 3, an unusual form of helium, that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays. But the government stopped making tritium in 1989, and the number of h-bombs has been decreasing.
“I have not heard any explanation of why this was not entirely foreseeable,†said Representative Brad Miller of North Carolina, chairman of a House subcommittee that is investigating the problem. An official from the Homeland Security department testified last week before his subcommittee, the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the House Science Committee, that demand for helium 3 appeared to exceed supply by tenfold.
In fact, said Mr. Miller, some government agencies did anticipate a crisis, but Homeland Security appears not to have gotten the message.
At the White House, Steven A. Fetter, assistant director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that the problem was short-term because other technologies would be developed. But, he said, while the government had a large surplus of helium 3 at the end of the cold war, “people should have been aware that this was a one-time windfall, and was not sustainable.â€
Helium 3 is not hazardous or even chemically reactive, and it is not the only material that can be used for neutron detection. Homeland Security 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 kitty litter, ceramic tiles and bananas, and sounds false alarms more often.
Earlier this year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, part of the Energy Department, said in a report, “No other currently available detection technology offers the stability, sensitivity, and gamma/neutron discrimination†of detectors using helium 3.
Helium 3 is used to detect neutrons, the sub-atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction in a bomb or a reactor. Plutonium, the favorite bomb-making material of most governments with nuclear weapons, intermittently gives off neutrons, which are harder for a smuggler to hide than other forms of radiation.
(Detecting the alternative bomb fuel, enriched uranium, is a separate, difficult problem, experts say.) Helium 3 is rare in nature, but the Energy Department accumulated a substantial stockpile as a byproduct of maintaining nuclear weapons.
Those weapons use tritium, which is the form of hydrogen used in the H-bomb, but the hydrogen decays into helium 3 at the rate of 5.5 percent a year. For that reason the tritium in each bomb has to be removed, purified and replenished every few years. It is purified by removing the helium 3.
The declining supply is also needed for physics research and medical diagnostics.
The Energy Department used to make tritium in reactors at its Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C., but those were shut after many operational problems.
It enlisted the Tennessee Valley Authority to make some tritium in a power reactor, using the same method it had used at Savannah River, breaking up another material, a form of lithium, with neutrons. One of the fragments is tritium. But that project has run into technical problems as well.
Canadian power reactors make tritium as a byproduct of power production, but they do not bother separating the helium 3. A spokesman for Ontario Power Generation said his company had had preliminary discussions with the Department of Energy, but that his company “hasn’t made a decision on whether this is a business we want to get into.â€
The helium-3 problem is another symptom of the decline of nuclear technology. The United States is also facing a shortage of medical isotopes that were plentiful in previous decades, because the production reactors have become old and unreliable.
Mr. Miller estimated that demand for helium 3 was about 65,000 liters per year through 2013 and that total production by the only two countries that produce it in usable form, the United States and Russia, was only about 20,000 liters. In a letter to President Obama, he called the shortage “a national crisis†and said that the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years, which threatens scientific research.