By Calvin Biesecker
A second round of field testing over the summer of next-generation radiation portal monitors showed that problems with the systems persist and there are not currently plans for a third series of tests, the House Science and Technology Committee says in its charter for today’s hearing to examine the Department of Homeland Security’s Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP) program.
In the July Field Validation Testing, the ASPs had several false positive alarms for nuclear material that didn’t exist, the committee says.
“In another disturbing incident during the tests, one ASP monitor stopped working altogether yet the system operator remained unaware of this malfunction,” the committee says. “Two dozen cargo trucks were permitted to go through the non-functioning portal monitor in order to be screened for potential radioactive and nuclear material until the problem became apparent.” The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), the DHS agency overseeing the ASP program, called this result a “Mission Critical Failure,” the committee says.
The panels’ Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight will hold a hearing on the ASP program today, its second of the year on the matter. The panel also says that it will examine supply shortages of Helium-3 (He-3) for radiation monitors that could hinder enhancements to currently deployed radiation portal monitors as well as the future deployment of ASPs, in addition to driving up the potential cost of the ASPs. He-3 can cost up to 20 times more than it did a few years ago and the ASP systems require three times as much of the gas than current radiation portal monitors, the panel says.
DNDO began the ASP effort in 2004 to detect and identify radioactive materials. Currently deployed radiation portal monitors can’t identify radioactive material and frequently alarm for harmless radiation, causing the need for a number of unnecessary secondary inspections.
The ASP systems are supposed to reduce the number of false positives produced by the existing portal monitors “but it has not been the reality during testing,” the House panel says. The outcome of the ASP testing is critical if the program is to advance to the full-scale production phase. Raytheon [RTN] and Thermo Fisher Scientific [TMO] are each developing ASP systems for DNDO.
Congress requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to certify that the ASP meet certain criteria before full-rate production begins. Those criteria, arrived at by DHS, DNDO and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)–the ultimate customer for the systems–require that ASP must detect potential threats as well or better than current radiation portal monitors in the primary screening role, reduce false positive alarms, and better detect Highly Enriched Uranium, the committee says. In the secondary screening mission, the certification criteria for the ASP are a lower probability of misidentifying special nuclear material and less time to conduct screening.
The committee says that while both companies’ systems have made it through integration testing, only Raytheon’s has entered Field Validation Testing. It was in the first round of field testing last February that the Raytheon system sent more cargo to secondary screening than the current portal monitors. The second round of testing in July occurred at four U.S. ports of entry and “reportedly reduced the number of false alarms compared to the PVT’s by 69 percent bringing them much closer to the 80 percent reduction in false alarms that they are required to meet,” the committee says.
However, the panel says that “new, more serious” challenges arose during the July tests. This was a case of identifying some of the cargo as containing special nuclear material when in fact there wasn’t any, the panel says.
The committee says that DHS doesn’t know yet why this mistake occurred but is working with Raytheon to decrease the sensitivity of the ASPs to correct the problem, thereby limiting false alarms and still detecting the special nuclear materials. However, the committee says this fix “also decreases the ostensible advantage of having the ASPs replace the PVTs (polyvinyl toluene-based radiation portal monitors) in the first place.”
Today’s hearing will include witnesses from DNDO, CBP and the Government Accountability Office.