Continuing difficulties in developing a new-generation of radiation portal monitors that would be deployed to the nation’s ports of entry to scan containers and vehicles for illicit nuclear materials means that the Department of Homeland Security probably won’t procure the systems, a senior department official says.
DHS hasn’t bothered to schedule an operational testing phase for the Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP), which is the last stage before deciding whether to enter production, because “we don’t think we’re going to procure this,” Tara O’Toole, under secretary for Science and Technology (S&T) at DHS, tells the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Management.
The ASP program is “pushing the envelope of physics” and “hasn’t worked as well as we hoped,” O’Toole says. Still, countering a Washington Post this month that cites an unreleased Government Accountability Office report that says that DHS plans to procure the new portal monitors despite a lack of sufficient testing, O’Toole said there has been a lot of testing, just not operational testing.
DHS is going to purchase a small number of the systems “to put in the field to try and understand why they don’t work and if they might be incrementally improved,” O’Toole said.
David Maurer, director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues for the GAO, tells the panel that ASP has been troubled since “day one,” pointing to concerns about the program’s ability to meet requirements, have reliable cost estimates, confidence in its deployment schedule and whether it represents better technology than the current monitors.
DHS in the late 1990s awarded contracts to Canberra Industries, Thermo Fisher Scientific [TMO] and Raytheon [RTN] to develop and begin producing ASP systems, which originally were expected to replace the current generation of radiation portal monitors because they frequently alarm on harmless radiological materials. ASPs were expected to reduce false alarms and help identify the radiological material hidden in shipping or trucking containers.
However, in Feb. 2010, DHS decided to abandon plans to use ASPs in a primary screening role at ports of entry in favor of continuing to develop the systems for use in secondary screening to help quickly resolve alarms by existing monitors.
The problem with the current generation of portal monitors is that “we’re getting as many as 300 hits per day in a single port on containers that look like they might have radioactive material in them,” O’Toole says. To resolve these alarms today requires either unpacking the containers or using handheld devices to slowly move around the outside of the containers to find the material, “which we think is an unsatisfactory set of options,” she says.
O’Toole notes that the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office within DHS is responsible for overseeing the development of the ASP technology. S&T is responsible for providing independent test and evaluation support.
House Budget Means Halting R&D
The House version of the FY ’12 Appropriations Bill for DHS would cut O’Toole’s budget request by more than 60 percent to $398.2 million, an action she calls “dire.” The bill actually cuts 80 percent of S&T’s research and development budget after fixed overhead costs and mandated activities are accounted for, she adds.
“If this budget goes through, or anything close to the House mark, we will stop doing R&D and most of our very good people will find other employment,” O’Toole warns. These are the people in this economy who actually have job options. These are really good engineers and scientists and they want to do R&D.”
O’Toole says the proposed budget would mean “basically shutting down test-beds that we have already invested money in. When you make the budget for R&D go up and down you lose all of your sunk costs because R&D projects generally play out over a number of years. So it not only costs money in the future but it wastes money already invested. It will also basically freeze DHS capabilities in place because we will not be developing new technology internally or with the commercial sector.”