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Fires force lab to close, but officials say hazardous materials are secured

In other words, there’s some nuclear material on premises, and the premises are somewhat besieged by the fire. The lab itself has been closed to all but critical personnel until Thursday as the fire skirts the boundaries of the facilities. At one point the flames actually crossed a state road and burned about an acre of the laboratory grounds.

But state fire officials and Los Alamos spokespeople say all nuclear and hazardous material is secured in concrete and steel vaults, and that the fire itself poses no real threat to those materials. These assurances did not stop the very same authorities from calling in teams to man its 60-plus AIRNET monitoring stations designed to alert the lab to any outside contamination coming from the lab grounds. Los Alamos’s lab director called it a precaution.

And it very likely is just a precaution, as Los Alamos is understandably a very secure facility. But that doesn’t mean America’s premier nuclear laboratory will be unaffected. Research there may have to be suspended if firefighters can’t get a handle on the wildfire threatening the nearby town of Los Alamos. Many of the lab’s 11,800 employed personnel live in the town, which has already been evacuated. If a large number of homes are destroyed, it could disrupt day-to-day operations at the lab for the foreseeable future.

[BBC, Scientific American]

The NNSS, only about 60 miles from Las Vegas, stretches across 1,360 square miles of Nevada desert. It’s a great place to, say, fire off experimental nuke tests, but it's also a formidable amount of perimeter to secure. So the Army has reduced its static security infrastructure load – cameras, motion detectors, buried cables, light towers, etc. – drastically by deploying three Mobile Detection Assessment Response Systems (MDARS), one of which is already on patrol as the others are being prepped.

The MDARS are camera-equipped but unarmed, so they still rely on their human counterparts in the case of a security breach. But the diesel-powered MDARS can putter about the property for up to 16 hours on a tank of fuel autonomously, looking for security threats or signs that someone has entered the property without authorization. They can also take inventory of objects around the site and interact with other security systems like gates and locks via RFID. Which is comforting, considering the site isn’t just a radioactive waste dump but also a weapons physics lab and testing ground.

The facility’s administrators estimate the savings in deploying the MDARS rather than implementing other security infrastructure are $6 million up-front with an annual savings of $1 million annually after that. We’ll be sure to let you know when the video surfaces of one of the ‘bots autonomously mowing down a target with an integrated automatic weapon (apparently the MDARS have been previously tested with weapons systems aboard) but until then you’ll have to settle for the video below, which is still amazing given the massive amount of space these robots have to patrol.

[National Nuclear Security Administration via Danger Room]

Only a few percent of the 15 million or so cargo containers that enter the country every year are screened for nukes, a number that Congress mandates must be 100 percent by 2012. That benchmark is impractical using today’s tech, however. Standard detectors can miss nuclear material hidden behind lead or steel, and naturally radioactive cargo such as kitty litter gives false positives, requiring a labor-intensive hand-search.

A new detector from Decision Sciences, a security company in California, sees through anything and can scan a semi in less than a minute. It tracks muons, cosmic particles constantly bombarding Earth. Muons penetrate everything but are deflected more by heavy atoms such as uranium and plutonium. The detector tracks these deflections.

The company finished lab tests this spring and is now building detectors to deploy at several ports in the next year. “As long as it works quickly enough, it should fit the bill,” says Robert Dynes, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego who reviewed radiation detectors for Homeland Security. Tests indicate that the device should be speedy on real cargo, says Decision Sciences’s chief technology officer, Allan Wegner. And it’s nearly foolproof. Wegner can’t go into detail about its weaknesses (for obvious reasons), but he assures us that kitty litter and watermelons will no longer threaten national security.

How It Works

As muons come from the sky, they pass through the top detector, the truck and the bottom detector. The muons create ionization trails in the scanner's gas-filled detector tubes, which sensors record.

Heavy atoms, such as uranium and plutonium, deflect muons more than lighter ones do. If the angles of muons' entrance and exit paths vary by a wide magin, nuclear material could be present.

The detector also senses gamma radiation, which the computer combines with muon data to build a 3D view of suspicious muon-scattering objects, alerting customs agents exactly where to search.