Talk:Lecture 4

Benchmarking

Benchmarking the cost of deploying the detection system that Eric Norman discussed for cargo container scanning:

He estimated that to be able to scan every container (or a large proportion, anyway), it will take about 100 scanners worldwide put at the right ports. The cost for a single scanner he estimates at $1 million to $10 million. Taking the larger (maybe to include some other accessory costs that crop up) the cost of the 100 scanners is $1 billion. But compared to what? Is this a good price to pay for scanning shipping containers for improvised nuclear weapons?

As a points of reference, I took a look at the budgets for the Department of Homeland Security and the Port of Oakland, both conveniently available on the web, easily searchable from those organizations websites.

DHS Fiscal year 2006 budget: $41.4 billion. This includes many things such as FEMA grants to hurricane victims, airport screening technologies, etc. It even includes a line for $125 million to purchase radiation portal monitors, which I think is what Prosnitz was describing, and $138.2 million for a pilot for container screening, CSI, to be piloted in 7 countries. So $1 billion would certainly overshoot the current budget for this aspect of DHS, but would be plenty to pilot this technology in a number of ports.

See the DHS budget for 2006: http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/Budget_BIB-FY2006.pdf

Port of Oakland The total yearly operating revenue for the port of oakland is $250 million (looks to be growing about $10 million a year). They are currently in the red, but hope to climb out of the red in the next several years. They are spending $2 million right now on a program to reduce emissions near the port. In their budget, amounts as small as $.5 million are mentioned initiatives. So a $10 million scanner seems like it could be prohibitively expensive without some major help from the government. The bigger analysis here which can't really be done on the internet is whether or not scanning a lot of containers would slow down operations to the degree of not being feasible to run a port. --Jameel 22:56, 21 Sep 2005 (PDT)

Active interrogation as detonator?

Dr. Norman's excellent lecture made me wonder whether someone could use active interrogation of containers to start a nuclear chain reaction. Could someone arrange things such that a mass of 235U around critical mass is just waiting for the thermal neutrons from a "nuclear car wash" to initiate a nuclear chain reaction?

Even if the thermal neutrons cannot be made to cause a chain reaction directly, I wonder whether they could still provide useful information to an attacker. One of the difficult things for an attacker, I presume, is to know when exactly to detonate a bomb. An important port is a good target. A gamma ray detector within the container could be the trigger for a more conventional gun-type nuclear bomb. There are certainly other ways for the bomb to determine its location, but they typically involve either electromagnetic communication through the container or monitoring and intervention by a human.