The Optimal Spatiotemporal Deployment of Radiation Portal Monitors Can Improve Nuclear Detection at Overseas Ports
نویسندگان
چکیده
Radiation portal monitors are starting to be deployed at overseas ports to prevent nuclear weapons from entering the U.S. in a shipping container. Current designs have containers on trucks passing through a portal monitor at approximately 10 mph, before being routed to one of several lanes at the port’s front gate for a driver identification check. For a fixed cost of testing, which consists of the costs of radiation portal monitors plus offsite x-ray and possibly manual testing of containers generating a false radiation alarm that cannot be resolved by gamma-ray imaging, the neutron detection limits of the current design are compared with those of two other designs that do not affect truck congestion at the front gate. For a wide range of budgets, it is optimal to have six monitors in each lane that simultaneously test a truck while it is being processed at the front gate. This design is robust against the location (within the container) of the weapon and reduces the detection limit (relative to the current design) by approximately a factor of three (although the accuracy of this value is limited by the lack of publicly available data) for practical budgets, which is enough to offset some shielding for a plutonium weapon, but insufficient to detect an uranium weapon.
منابع مشابه
Preventing the importation of illicit nuclear materials in shipping containers.
We develop a mathematical model to find the optimal inspection strategy for detecting a nuclear weapon (or nuclear material to make a weapon) from being smuggled into the United States in a shipping container, subject to constraints of port congestion and an overall budget. We consider an 11-layer security system consisting of shipper certification, container seals, and a targeting software sys...
متن کاملGAO-10-252T Combating Nuclear Smuggling: Recent Testing Raises Issues About the Potential Effectiveness of Advanced Radiation Detection Portal Monitors
متن کامل
Electromagnetic Radiofrequency Radiation Emitted from GSM Mobile Phones Decreases the Accuracy of Home Blood Glucose Monitors
Mobile phones are two-way radios that emit electromagnetic radiation in microwave range. As the number of mobile phone users has reached 6 billion, the bioeffects of exposure to mobile phone radiation and mobile phone electromagnetic interference with electronic equipment have received more attention, globally. As self-monitoring of blood glucose can be a beneficial part of diabetes control, ho...
متن کاملEvaluation of Ludlum Corporation's portable portal monitor and comparison with the HML'S existing portal monitors.
Since the Human Monitoring Laboratory compared two types of portal monitors (the P3 and the MiniSentry) that could be field deployed in response to an emergency, two more brands have been added to the inventory. This paper summarizes a comparison of the capabilities of the previous portal monitors with the two additions: the Thermo Eberline TPM-903B and the Ludlum 52-1-1. The comparison shows t...
متن کاملEvaluation of the Portal Imaging System Performance for an Elekta Precise Linac in Radiotherapy
Introduction: Electronic portal imaging devices (EPIDs) provide two- and three-dimensional planar and volumetric cone beam images to improve the accuracy of radiation treatment delivery. Periodic quality assurance (QA) of EPIDs is essential for dosimetric verification in radiotherapy. In this study, a QA program was implemented to evaluate the function of the EPID to be confident in applying co...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2007