"If a Radioactive Fly Farts, I can Pick It up"

[MKSheppard]

Link

NYPD'S U-BOAT FLEET
URANIUM DETECTORS
By PETER COX and BILL SANDERSON
Posted: 4:10 am
August 16, 2008

A pair of high-tech police boats passed a critical drill yesterday, detecting a small amount of uranium hidden in a parade of pleasure craft beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Seventeen pleasure boats captained by members of the Coast Guard Auxiliary sailed beneath the bridge. They didn't look any different from the other boats moving through the harbor.

But as the decoy fleet passed, it was scanned by highly sensitive detectors aboard two NYPD craft.

From a half-mile away, the cops' boats quickly zeroed in on their quarry - a 28-foot cabin cruiser from Staten Island named "The Last Dollar," which was carrying a plastic bag containing a small amount of uranium that was not highly radioactive.

"If a radioactive fly farts, I can pick it up," said Detective David Kao, a boat pilot and a member of the NYPD's Counterterrorism Bureau.

For years, police have patrolled the harbor and the waterways around the city with boats capable of detecting radioactive material that terrorists might use in a bomb.

But that detection equipment alerted cops only to radioactive materials and couldn't always give them an idea how much material there was or whether it was dangerous.

"The old stuff tells you something is there, but it doesn't tell you what it is," Kao said.

The new boats - costing $1 million apiece - have much more sensitive detection equipment. "It's highly specific," Kao said.

The boats were deployed last month, and the city hopes to add eight more to the fleet within the next year. Cops call the craft TRACS (Tactical Radiological Acquisition and Characterization System) boats.

There's nothing obvious about the TRACS craft, which are each 31 feet long and powered by two 350-horsepower engines and look like regular police boats.

"Anybody who's had chemotherapy or any type of radiation treatment, this boat can sense it," said Capt. Michael Riggio, also of the Counterterrorism Bureau. "It identifies medical, weapons-grade and industrial radiological and nuclear isotopes."

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I recall Stuart talking about this for a long time, about how we had one metric ton of radiological detectors in the hands of the USCG.

[Sea Skimmer]

I recall Stuart talking about this for a long time, about how we had one metric ton of radiological detectors in the hands of the USCG.

Yeah, unfortunately they get hoards of false alarms from stuff like kitty litter and porcelain, in both cases because the clay it’s made from is ever so mildly radioactive above background levels. Hopefully these new systems are as good as they are being touted in the article and can actually distinguish between different sources.

[Sarevok]

Wow. In the new BSG tv series they had this impressive ability to detect nuclear warheads at great range. So if a salvo of missiles was fired their point defense could isolate and engage the one carrying the nuke hidden among the cheap conventional missiles. I thought it was a neat plot device for a scifi tv show. But real world sensors doing it ? That's amazing.

[Winston Blake]

Does anyone know how these things work? Wikipedia tells me that uranium is merely a weak alpha emitter. How the hell do you pick that up that through a yacht hull?

[Darth Wong]

Even several metres of air will normally stop alpha radiation.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I have a feeling they are using remote sensing, meaning they are shooting a laser and getting the reflection and then examining the spectra.

It's quite a growing field actually. They are actually thinking of using an optical comb and then doing a fourier transform on the signal received.