The session on Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Terrorism this morning could have been renamed the session on scary numbers. Invited speakers Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland, Brent Park of LANL and Mike Carter of the Department of Homeland Security, did a good job at raising the audience’s personal ‘threat levels’ to Code Red.
Here are some of those stats:
Globally there are 30,000 nuclear weapons, but the uncertainty in that number is in the thousands.
When it comes to nuclear explosive materials, the accounting is even more uncertain. There are some 490 metric tonnes of plutonium, and some 1900 metric tonnes of highly-enriched uranium (with uncertainty in the 100 tonne range).
Although there are less than a dozen states with nuclear weapons , highly enriched uranium is still used in the research reactors of 40 countries.
And this is just the legal stuff – clandestine materials are of course the hardest to account for.
Both Steve Fetter and Mike Carter want to see more physics PhDs get involved in research related to non-proliferation. According to Carter the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office is currently expanding its research portfolio in Nuclear Detection Technology both for monitoring compliance with weapons treaties and for detecting clandestine material in trucks and ships. Go check them out at www.dhs.gov/dndobids.
Brent Park, together with other physicists in the audience, are already working on technologies to distinguish between kitty litter and highly-enriched uranium at US borders…and if you don’t think that’s a problem, here’s another number for you:
Of the false alarms reported by the Canadian border patrol, one-third were caused by kitty litter shipments. Another 16% were caused by medical isotopes.
More on that new detector technology tomorrow…
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