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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory photo/ Bruce Williams-Burden The Coast Guard Cutter Osprey serves as a mother ship to several small boats participating in an exercise to test non-intrusive small vessel radiological screenings in Puget Sound. |
By Patrick Tracey, HSO Contributor
In an obvious bow to understatement, Bill Peterson describes his job of figuring out how to screen 30,000 small vessels a year that sail through the Puget Sound - each one a potential threat to national security - as a daunting task. Any one of these vessels could be hiding what the project manager for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calls illegal rad nuke materials smuggled across the maritime border by a terrorist group.
Thats why we had so many boats out there, he said of a large-scale screening exercise conducted September 23 in Washingtons Puget Sound to test passive sensor equipment that registers gamma rays and neutrons from nuclear devices.
Boat traffic on the Sound is expected to multiply during the Winter Olympics next year in Vancouver, British Columbia. Peterson said the need to have a small vessel screening process prior to the Games was obvious to everyone, but the need is critical anyway. The Olympics played into it, he said, but its really just one check in our check box.
The two-day test involved about 50 small vessels, including 27 Coast Guard auxiliary vessels and three research vessels from his lab that worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), which funded the pilot at $3.5 million.
Peterson worked with DNDO to coordinate the activities with the Coast Guard and other state, local and tribal agencies in three security zones: Admiralty Inlet, Bellingham Bay and North Skagit Bay.
Captain Dave Crowley, United States Coast Guard, at DNDO, said the aim was to safely identify and interdict radiological materials as far away as possible from populated areas and critical facilities. He said it was important to make inspections with minimal impact to routine commercial and recreational boating activities.
We set up three zones where we had law enforcement doing the rad nuke screening for all inbound vessels, Peterson said. Nine of the vessels carried nuclear radiation sources on board, but only three of nine would be considered threat vessels. Of course, only Peterson and his people knew which of the vessels had the sources. None of the blue forces knew which vessels were carrying them, he noted.
To check the effectiveness of the sensors, authorities relied mainly on portable detection equipment as the primary method. With these smaller units the vessels had to be boarded. But there were enough vessels going through that everyone had a chance to go through the process, Peterson said.
He said the equipment is easy enough to operate with practice. Its a perishable skill, much of it involving the ability to identify radioisotope on spectrum, he said. You have to keep training.
Beyond the handheld devices, one Coast Guard vessel had a more powerful detector mounted on board for a specific test in the Bellingham Bay. This ship-mounted detector, boasting 30 times the range of a hand-held device, picked up the presence of helium-3 tubes located in the cabin area of the vessel about 30 feet away.
Once identified, the radioisotope image is sent to CPB for immediate lab analysis. CBTs scientific arm is on call 24-7 with scientists who look at the spectra to make a determination on what possibly has been seen with the equipment.
A wrong isotope identification can lead to costly and unnecessary interdiction operations, a concern since the detectors are not always able to eliminate false identifications. The equipment is good but not perfect, Peterson acknowledges. The scientists get used to looking at the energy peaks in the gamma ray spectra at a much higher co-efficient than the equipment can itself.
One complication is the profusion of medical isotopes from common medical uses. Treatments for cancer often use radioactive seeds that are implanted in tumors to shrink them.
Also, for stress tests radioactive dye is injected into the patients bloodstream. It takes a few days to come out of your system and so youre basically giving off gamma rays for the half life of the radioisotope they give you, says Peterson.
These medical isotopes alert law enforcement officers, but they understand that, Peterson explained. Itll move with you [on board the vessel] and the detection will go with the person, whereas if the rad nuke source is in the hole of the boat, it will stay there.
Bigger vessels prevent less of a threat due to the requirement of the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) for all boats over 300 gross tons to have a transponder installed and to give 96 hours of notification that it is arriving in port, plus a 24-hour advance manifest of everyone on board.
Apart from recreational boats and yachts, vessels that weigh under 300 tons and escape the MTSA requirements include commercial tugs and oil supply rig vessels.
In a years time, theres 30,000 transit of small vessels reported through Customs from either international or Canadian waters. CBP boards all vessels at five ports of entry.
For the threat from smaller vessels, state and local law enforcement using the same equipment provides another layer of security, Peterson said.
Patrick Tracey has written for the Washington Post and Defense News, among many other publications. He covered the British Parliament and Whitehall for the Bureau of National Affairs in Washington, D.C., and is the author of several works of nonfiction.
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