Nuclear bomb sniffers catch cold

SHOOT: H3, a type of Helium, is running thin, apparently making the job of sniffing out the smuggling of nuclear weapons problematic. If it was a serious threat to national security one would imagine this would no be broadcast in the mainstream media. A would be terrorist would go: NOW IS MY CHANCE! Then again, perhaps this is a ploy to get exactly this sort of response.

Mr. Miller estimated that demand for helium 3 was about 65,000 liters per year through 2013 and that total production by the only two countries that produce it in usable form, the United States and Russia, was only about 20,000 liters. In a letter to President Obama, he called the shortage “a national crisis” and said that the price had jumped to $2,000 a liter from $100 in the last few years, which threatens scientific research.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Nuclear Bomb Detectors Stopped by Material Shortage The ingredient is helium 3, an unusual form of helium, that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays. But the government stopped making tritium in 1989, and the number of h-bombs has been decreasing. In fact, said Mr. Miller, some government agencies did anticipate a crisis, but Homeland Security appears not to have gotten the message. Earlier this year, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, part of the Energy Department, said in a report, “No other currently available detection technology offers the stability, sensitivity, and gamma/neutron discrimination” of detectors using helium 3. Helium 3 is used to detect neutrons, the sub-atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction in a bomb or a reactor. Plutonium, the favorite bomb-making material of most governments with nuclear weapons, intermittently gives off neutrons, which are harder for a smuggler to hide than other forms of radiation.