The scramble for effective homeland security technology is bringing attention to an unusual player in the high-tech sweepstakes - the United States national laboratories.
In popular culture, the names Los Alamos and Sandia conjure up images of atomic testing in desert locales. Today the specter of a nuclear "dirty bomb" winding its way through a U.S. port of entry makes the laboratories uniquely suited to combat such an attack.
If the idea of a nuclear scientist milling around an ocean container of bananas sounds far-fetched, one such expert said he's not surprised. "Most people think of the labs as being somewhere on a Nevada test site, but we're omnipresent. You don't know where we'll show up," joked Dr. William Dunlop, program leader for proliferation prevention and arms control at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
These days Dunlop spends much of his time at transportation hubs since his facility is responsible for much of the evaluation and testing of counter-terrorism devices to be used at seaports. He owes his presence on the dock to a federal mandate issued to the laboratories a decade ago to develop counter-terror research in the aftermath of attacks on U.S. interests overseas and concerns about "loose nukes" rolling around Eastern Europe.
The national laboratories may seem an unlikely ally in the transportation business, but Jonathan Medalia, a specialist in national defense for the Congressional Research Service, said they have a useful role in homeland security.
"They can develop sensors, help first responders plan for nuclear terrorism, and help the intelligence community put bits of intelligence together," Medalia said. "People tend to think of them as just being in nuclear weapons research, but while that remains their core, the labs focus on other areas, and this focus changes from time to time in response to the nation's needs."
Depending on the era, the national laboratories have been involved in tasks as diverse as nuclear test detection, finding alternative energy solutions, ballistic missile defense, the Human Genome Project, and now homeland security, Medalia said.
The national laboratories are a network of 17 scientific research institutions across the country. They employ 30,000 scientists and engineers who are responsible for research in science, energy, national security and environmental quality.
The concept for the labs originated during World War II with the Manhattan Project, the federal government's code name for the atomic bomb. After the war, the research and development facilities created for that endeavor came under the supervision of the Atomic Energy Commission. They now reside within the commission's successor, the Department of Energy.
"The Department of Energy has the experts when it comes to the nuclear threat. They've already played a huge role in deploying technology in the former U.S.S.R. to safeguard nuclear facilities," said Dean Boyd, a U.S. Customs spokesman.
Customs and the DOE, under the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, created a joint program 10 years ago for border guards in Eastern Europe and Asia, to train them in how to stop nuclear arms smuggling.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Customs stepped up its association with the labs to learn more about the nuclear threat on the home front, an issue that is at the heart of Customs' intensive effort to secure the ocean container transportation system as quickly as possible through programs such as the Container Security Initiative. "It's been an educational process for us," Boyd acknowledged.
That's because radiation isn't always dangerous. "Even dirt gives off radiation," Boyd said. No one wants to waste time yanking a container of ceramic tiles because it gave off a positive reading, as one did a few weeks ago on the container ship Palermo Senator at the Port of New York and New Jersey.
So Customs turned to the laboratories to develop isotope detection equipment that registers the different levels of emitted radiation. The device makes it easier to distinguish between cargo that's OK, such as ceramic tiles, and cargo that's not, such as weapons-grade uranium.
For the Livermore Lab's Dunlop, an expert in nuclear proliferation issues, the post-Sept. 11 emphasis on homeland security means understanding how freight moves around the world. He's learning fast.
"Port issues are an interesting problem in that we're so reliant on intermodal cargo shipping," Dunlop said. "If you shut down intermodal cargo shipments for any amount of time, you create an economic crisis because it's an integral part of the U.S. and the world."
Dunlap couldn't talk like this a year ago. At the same time, Carl D'Emilio, president of Advent Inc. of New Providence, N.J., couldn't say much about nuclear science. That changed when his company developed Cargo Sentry, a device for detecting weapons of mass destruction inside marine containers at the moment they are loaded on a ship. Cargo Sentry is among the technologies under evaluation by Dunlop's team.
The company's niche is creating transportation software solutions, but it moved into the security hardware business after Sept. 11. The Transportation Security Administration put the two men in touch. The Livermore connection caught D'Emilio by surprise. "When we came out of the TSA meeting we felt like we had been knocked down a notch when we were told to meet with the Livermore Lab," D'Emilio recalled.
"I thought we were being told that we had to prove our technology but in hindsight, I realize we were being promoted. The TSA thought well enough of our product to ask us to meet with the lab," he said.
The Cargo Sentry device is a radiation-detection system that clips onto a crane's spreader bar. Unlike other proposed solutions, this one is not permanently mounted to the crane. In theory, that would make it more economical to use, since only those cranes loading cargo bound for the U.S. would use it.
Dunlop said the device is a unique and intriguing concept but must still undergo rigorous testing before it could be deployed. Such assessments are part of the lab's mandate to develop anti-terror systems.
"Anything that costs a lot of money will get some kind of peer review. The labs will do some of that to make sure the technology works as advertised," in a variety of port settings and at reasonable cost, Dunlop said.
As the laboratories evaluate technologies from private industry, they're also dusting off technologies that were developed years ago, mainly to protect U.S. military personnel from radiation.
Now those technologies are being redeployed in transportation. The accessibility of radiation worldwide is one reason. Radiation used for medical testing or industrial uses often winds up in junk heaps in countries with poor disposal controls. These discarded stockpiles become available resources for dirty bombs.
Dunlop said, "The threat of a dirty bomb is legitimate, and it's something we have to worry about."
