[ RadSafe ] Article: How to Listen for the Sound of Plutonium

Wed Feb 1 11:46:03 CST 2006

>From the New York Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/31nuke.html

(I really do not get the title of the article.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 31, 2006

How to Listen for the Sound of Plutonium 
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — In March 2004, the science and
technology directorate of the Central Intelligence
Agency called a secret meeting of hundreds of the
government's top experts in nuclear intelligence to
address a problem that had bedeviled Washington for
decades: how to know, with precision, when a country
is about to cross the line and gain the ability to
build an atomic bomb.

The aim of the two-day conference was to reinvigorate
the nation's atomic espionage efforts, not with spies
on the ground or satellites in space but with a new
generation of advanced technologies meant to detect
the faintest clues of nuclear activity.

The meeting, said an official who attended, "was to
galvanize people to say, 'We recognize this is a big
problem and we need to get everybody thinking about
it.' "

"There was a hope that, out of this, promising new
approaches might be identified," the official
continued.

The experts discussed a range of potential tools,
including new ways to monitor electric power lines for
the signature of high-speed centrifuges as they purify
uranium and lasers that can track radioactive dust.
Also on the agenda were more fanciful items, like
robotic butterflies that can monitor an atomic site
while appearing to flutter by innocuously.

Nearly two years later, federal officials and
scientists say that meeting and other secret actions
have accelerated the government's efforts to develop
new atomic espionage technologies. The research
focuses on better detection of four basic, but
inconspicuous, signatures that covert nuclear
facilities and materials can emit: distinctive
chemicals, sounds, electromagnetic waves and isotopes,
or forms of the same element that have different
numbers of neutrons, a subatomic building block.

Now, the Iranian crisis could pose a big test of how
far that technology has come. On Thursday in Vienna,
the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency is
to consider what to do about Tehran's recent decision
to restart its enrichment of uranium, which many
Western nations see as a major step toward the
acquisition of nuclear arms. 

American officials say better remote monitoring — some
of which appears to have already begun— could prove
crucial if Iran follows through on its threat to limit
cooperation with international inspectors.

At a minimum, the crisis is putting more pressure on
intelligence agencies to find out if Iran harbors
secret nuclear sites. And after Iraq, there is huge
pressure to get it right. 

It is hard to say which, if any, of the new ideas have
come to fruition because the work is highly
classified. So too, it is unclear how well an improved
generation of monitoring devices are yet helping
American intelligence officials see into Iran, North
Korea or other states suspected of trying to build
atomic weapons. The C.I.A. declined comment.

However, officials say that the program has become a
high priority and that the work is now spread across
the C.I.A., the Energy Department and the Defense
Department, as well as government laboratories,
military contractors and universities.

One participant in the C.I.A. meeting characterized
the effort as a bureaucratic overreaction prompted by
a string of recent intelligence failures. "We're
throwing money at it," he said. "We've created a whole
business of people looking for needles in haystacks."
That participant, like many other scientists and
officials, spoke on the condition of anonymity because
of the effort's secrecy.

One topic at the C.I.A. meeting was tiny monitoring
devices that can fly. Federal researchers are creating
new classes of such remote-controlled aircraft,
pushing the art of miniaturization in what are known
as microflyers. Discussion focused on whether such
devices could carry minuscule sensors to sniff out
atomic activity. 

That effort is embryonic, experts say. The
government's research program centers more immediately
on developing larger but still stealthy sensors that
can detect the making and manipulation of such key
atomic ingredients as uranium hexafluoride gas, which
is fed into centrifuges as part of the enrichment
process.

One way to track the gas is to detect atmospheric
rises in radioactivity as well as the uranium 235
isotope, which is unique to enrichment. Federal
experts say research on that goal is under way at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as the Los
Alamos and Livermore weapons labs. Steve Wampler, a
Livermore spokesman, said the California laboratory
could say nothing "beyond that the work is an
important element for proliferation detection."

Another goal, officials say, is to develop remote
means of tracking plumes from clandestine sites that
leak the chemical byproducts of uranium hexafluoride,
revealing the presence of the toxic gas. "That's the
smoking gun," a nuclear expert said. 

Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist who has
long advised the federal government on national
security issues, lauded the overall effort. "It's
important to get, as early as possible, reliable
evidence on what may be clandestine facilities," he
said. "Being able to develop better ways to do things
like this is a high-priority issue."

Tehran's acts have given sudden prominence not only to
research meant to improve atomic espionage but, in
less classified forms, to aid the nuclear inspectors
of the United Nations' I.A.E.A. 

Even the less secret versions of such technologies can
be quite exotic, including sensors that track ghostly
particles known as antineutrinos — a kind of
antimatter.

There are signs that atomic espionage is already
aiding Washington's hunt for clandestine Iranian
sites. Late last year, Iran publicly complained to the
United Nations about two unmanned American aircraft
that it said crashed on its territory. In interviews,
two federal intelligence experts said such drone
aircraft, launched from Iraq, periodically spy on
suspected nuclear sites. 

"They look for all kinds of emissions," said a senior
intelligence official.

The United States has practiced various forms of
atomic surveillance since the earliest days of the
cold war, flying jets around the globe to pick up
radioactive dust from atomic testing, or to detect
faint emissions from plants harvesting plutonium for
bomb fuel. 

In 1991, the research began focusing more intensely on
uranium, the other main path to building nuclear
weapons. This came about when United Nations
inspectors discovered, after the gulf war, that the
United States and its allies had vastly underestimated
Iraq's progress on developing a uranium bomb. 

In the mid-1990's, the I.A.E.A. conducted studies to
investigate the monitoring of air, water and land for
clues. A 1999 agency report found that uranium
releases might be detected at distances of up to 64
kilometers, or 40 miles, but cautioned that, over wide
areas, pinpointing the source would be difficult.

"The conclusion was, 'Yes, it's technically feasible,'
" recalled Jill Cooley, a senior I.A.E.A. official.
"However, it was seen as being extremely expensive to
implement," requiring dense arrays of detectors to
monitor target areas successfully. "For us, it didn't
seem like the bang was worth the buck."

The landscape changed drastically by early 2004. After
invading Iraq, the United States came to realize that
it had overestimated Saddam Hussein's efforts to make
unconventional arms. At the same time, intelligence
officials saw that they had seriously underestimated
the damage done by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani
nuclear engineer who had secretly supplied nuclear
know-how to Iran, Libya, North Korea and perhaps other
countries. 

The twin failures produced a surge of interest in
improving the methods of atomic espionage.

The C.I.A. meeting, held on March 18 and 19 of 2004 at
the Virginia offices of Science Applications
International Corporation, a federal contractor, came
just two months after Dr. Khan's arrest. Its speakers
included Dr. Duane F. Starr, an expert on nuclear
proliferation at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, a federal
complex that specializes in how best to gather
intelligence on the use of uranium abroad.

A recommendation of the meeting was that the United
States build a secret center where scientists could
practice monitoring the kind of first-generation
centrifuges sold by Dr. Khan.

"The notion of a test bed was really pushed," a
participant recalled, using the phrase to describe a
centrifuge facility where American researchers could
conduct surveillance experiments. "The problem was
that it was seen as expensive, really expensive." 

Although the United States obtained some of these
centrifuges from Libya after it agreed to end its
nuclear program, it is not known whether the
government has used them as part of a testing
facility.

Several intelligence experts said they believed Iran
was well aware of the range of remote sensors trained
on its corners, even if it did not know their specific
technical capabilities, and was probably engaged in
devising countermeasures. It is a kind of
technological intelligence race.

Robert Joseph, the under secretary of state for arms
control and international security, who has led the
drive within the administration to find new ways to
pressure Iran and North Korea, called the research
vital. 

"There is an urgency and imperative to invest in the
technology to determine which approaches are best," he
said in an interview. While declining to discuss
specific methods, he added: "Some will work. Some will
not. But it is the geopolitics that makes this
urgent."

Experts inside and outside the Bush administration
agree that the new technologies, even if successful,
are no substitute for the human inspectors of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, who have the
right, at least on paper, to examine closely suspect
facilities.

The Iranians, say I.A.E.A. inspectors, are acutely
aware that many if not all detection technologies work
best in close proximity to nuclear facilities. That is
one reason Iran's recent threat to stop cooperating
with inspectors worries Western nations that are
trying to negotiate limits on Tehran's nuclear
efforts.

"There is a lot we can now do with remote sensing," a
senior government official said recently. "But it is
very hard when you talk about activities going on in
buildings that don't generate a unique signature.
There are real limits to what you can do."

David E. Sanger reported from Washington for this
article and William J. Broad from New York and Vienna.

+++++++++++++++++++
"Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an email."  - Eliot Spitzer, New York state attorney general

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 