The head of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) told Congress yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will not pursue certification and production of a new system designed to scan containers and vehicles for radiological materials at ports of entry and will instead focus attention on pursuing commercial alternatives as well as new handheld detection devices.
Last week, the top DHS science official, Tara O’Toole, said it was unlikely that the department would continue forward with the Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP) program due to difficulties getting the technology to work as hoped (Defense Daily, July 18).
Yesterday, DNDO Director Warren Stern confirmed O’Toole’s assessment, saying that the “most recent field validation [evaluation] revealed that the original design specification for ASP, jointly developed by DNDO and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) in 2007, does not adequately reflect the operational needs in the field, particularly truck speeds in secondary inspection.”
Early last year, DHS decided to refocus the ASP effort away from developing and deploying the systems as primary radiation screening systems in favor of a more limited role for secondary inspections. That won’t happen now.
However, since the program began in 2004, some companies have been developing competing portal systems that are commercially available that DNDO will assess, Stern said. Rapiscan Systems, a division of OSI Systems [OSIS], is one of those companies.
Canberra Industries, which was earlier dropped from the ASP program, Raytheon [RTN] and Thermo Fisher Scientific [TMO] have been developing systems. Going forward, Stern said that DHS will use 13 of the ASP systems that have been built for evaluations at select ports of entry, so that users can better understand what the spectroscopic technology can do “generically” as well as help define requirements for a future competition based on commercial portal systems.
Also, for DNDO, Stern said that for it to improve the way it tests, models its testing, and then repeats that process for these portal systems, “there’s a big need to model the stream of commerce and the radiation that’s in the environment.”
While there will be costs associated with deploying the ASP units for the evaluations, the data that is obtained and the requirements definition is worth it, Stern said.
Still, Stern said that DNDO and CBP are working with the White House Office of Management and Budget and congressional appropriators to reallocate funding requested in FY ’12 for ASP to be prioritized for handheld detection and identification systems. He also said the CBP will “apply more rigorous concepts of operation for use in secondary inspections with handheld detectors.”
Various handheld systems are already used by CBP for secondary inspections but the systems, which require manually intensive use, are slow. This will still be an issued going forward as the handhelds are not as effective as a large portal monitor system, Stern said.
DNDO is eyeing two new, advanced handheld systems that have been finalized. The Advanced Operation Handheld device will be used by special teams at the Coast Guard and CBP, Stern said. The other, the RadSeeker, is a small area search system. DHS will make a decision on RadSeeker production tomorrow, he said.
The ASP system was expected to replace the current generation of radiation portal monitors used at the nation’s land, sea and in some cases air ports of entry. The current technology is criticized for too many false alarms on materials that produce harmless amounts of radiation, often requiring time consuming secondary inspections. Spectroscopic portal technology still offers the potential for more effective scanning than enhancements to the current technology, Stern said.