By Calvin Biesecker
The White House has convened an interagency policy committee to address the nation’s shortage of Helium-3 (He-3) gas used in a variety of applications, including neutron detector tubes that are part of radiation portal monitors (RPM), and decided in September that no new He-3 will be given for RPM production for now, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official told Congress yesterday.
The shortage of He-3 is “severe,” Dr. William Hagan, acting deputy director for the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), told the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Demand will “outstrip supply by a factor of 10,” he said.
He-3, which is a non-radioactive gas given off as a byproduct of tritium decay–tritium being a key component in nuclear weapons–is required to produce currently deployed RPMs and the next-generation systems, called Advanced Spectroscopic Portals (ASPs). The gas is also a critical component in medical imaging systems, the oil and gas industry and high- energy research.
DNDO for several years has been funding research into alternatives to He-3 but once it settles on one, it could take another one to two years to test and evaluate to ensure that it works in RPMs, Hagan said. Some options include separating He-3 found in natural gas wells or acquiring it from other countries, he said.
“Most likely” an alternative to He-3 will have to be found, Hagan said.
But the shortage of He-3 is making it difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis between the ASP and the current generation of RPMs, Hagan said. That cost benefit analysis is one of the key data points that will be factored into whether DHS decides to move forward with full-rate production of ASPs, whether the systems are used in both primary and secondary screening of containers entering the U.S. or possibly just secondary applications.
Before a production decision is made, the ASP program also has to go through a third round of Field Validation Testing with Customs and Border Protection, which is the end user of the system, followed by operational test and evaluation, which will be carried out by independent test branch of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate.
A third round of field tests is needed after the second round in July found continued problems with one of the systems in development. Those problems include alerting for special nuclear materials when, in fact, none were in the cargo being inspected and not alerting the operator when a system shut down, thereby causing a number of cargo containers to pass through potentially unscreened (Defense Daily, Nov. 17). In this case, an existing RPM was also used.
Hagan said that DNDO and the contractor, in this case Raytheon [RTN], have found a fix for both problems. He said the system shut down was only on one system and that the alert message to the operator was confusing. That message on the operator’s console will be simplified, he said.
Regarding the false positives, Hagan said a replay tool was used to test the fix and has shown that the vast majority of the problems have been fixed. The replay tool was verified by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory but a Government Accountability Official testified that it would be better to have a standards body such as ANSI validate the tool.
Todd Owen, CBP’s executive director for Cargo and Conveyance Security, said his agency believes that DNDO has made the proper fixes to the ASP system and is ready to begin the next round of field validation tests during the first quarter of 2010.
In addition to Raytheon, Thermo Fisher Scientific [TMO] is also developing an ASP system for DNDO. However, Thermo Fisher has not advanced to the field testing phase due to continue technical issues that are being sorted out.
Current generation RPMs alert for potential radiation threats but can’t identify the material. ASP systems are supposed to be able to provide, alert and identify the radiological material, allowing CBP to reduce the numbers of containers that are both sent for secondary screening and, in some cases, have to be physically searched.