Hunting for illegal nuclear activities

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This hand-held gadget sets off a beep on sensing uranium (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

The 18 recruits in this year’s weapons inspector training course spent their first couple of months studying the history and legal framework of the IAEA’s mission. Now they’re up to their eyebrows in beeps and whistles.

The handheld devices are about the size of ping pong paddles but they sound like an old fashioned Atari game…Pong maybe. But a weapons inspector trainee from Australia, identified as Y, explains just how sophisticated these tools are. He moves the black instrument slowly over a desk until he reaches a small, radioactive disk to see if he can find a radioactive source.

“I just do a sweep of the area and once you hear a tone, then you’ve found your source.”

This is just one of the gizmos that the future inspectors are getting comfortable with. There are sodium iodine detectors, uranium isotope analysers, and spontaneous plutonium fission meters. Recruit Y said mastering it all is a challenge.

“Just learning how to use some of this stuff is mind blowing,” he said. “Some of the physics behind it, you have to sit there for two weeks just to absorb it. And then you get to play with it.”

These inspectors are also learning how to install and use on-site surveillance cameras. The cameras are to make sure nuclear materials don’t move or disappear…say from a room where enriched uranium is stored. The aspiring inspectors are also learning how to ensure the integrity of the cameras.

The typical field camera is covered by a metal, screw-on casing. Then you can seal it in any number of ways. One seal is like a metal bottlecap that has random scratches and marks inside it that make it impossible to copy.

Another uses fiber – optic cables that stop transmitting if the seal is cut or disconnected. The cameras and other devices aren’t exactly locked but another recruit, X, said they might as well be.

“They’re just sealed so that if somebody does tamper with it we’ll be able to find out,” X said. “The same goes with our electronics. If someone cuts the lines we’d know it.”

The future inspectors’ tools won’t be limited to what they can carry. There’s a sophisticated support network that stays right here in Vienna. Think of it as what air traffic control is to a pilot. The trainees are becoming intimately familiar with the Vienna based technology as well.

In a highly secure section of this vast UN complex, satellite imagery analyst Julien Elbez sits before a computer. If you thought Google Earth was impressive, Elbez’s software is in a different league. He says he and his team can examine every nuclear facility in the world from this control room.

“We are trying to look at a site from a global perspective,” Elbez said. “Where is it located? Is it close to a city, to transport network? All of this is important because nuclear work requires heavy systems that need transport.”

Elbez relays his concerns to the inspectors in the field.

When the inspectors arrive at the site in question, they will deploy their most trusted tool in the field. It looks like a mini handkerchief but all is it is a four-inch by four-inch cotton swipe because radioactive particles stick to cotton.

The inspectors will use the cotton swipes to wipe suspicious surfaces. Then they’ll send the swipes to another support facility — a laboratory about an hour outside Vienna.

That lab is a clean room environment — you have to pass through an air-shower before you enter. If you’d just gotten out of the shower, this would dry you off in about four seconds. Then you don a clean-suit and pass through a series of dust free chambers.

Lab director David Donohue said all of this is necessary to keep that little cotton swipe clean.

“Otherwise you might suspect some problems,” Donohue said. “Cross contamination. We’re similar to pharmaceutical or computer chip companies. That’s why we use clean rooms. The air is specially filtered, all furniture is specially chosen. People wear suits. All of this to stop cross-contamination.”

Here, Donohue’s team takes a cotton swipe sent in from the field and dissolves it in acid. A bit of residue remains and it could contain traces of uranium or plutonium. Donohue and his colleagues can find out what those particles are by shooting them through a multi-million dollar mass spectrometer.

“We’re looking for a needle in haystack; just a few particles of undeclared material amongst millions of declared particles,” Donohue said. “At a non-nuke facility, inspectors can swipe anywhere. In a parking lot, an office building, baby food factory, whatever. And by looking we can see whether someone handled uranium or plutonium in those places.”

Back in Vienna, many of the inspector trainees say they didn’t know they’d have such sophisticated support for their field work. Class recruit Y said that’s just another in a string of surprises as he learns how complex controlling nuclear proliferation is.

“You first come and think, oh, I’m just gonna do some inspections,” Y said. “It can’t be so hard. And then they say, ‘here’s the instrumentation’. And this is the paperwork and this is the system. So if you think you’re gonna just go out into the field, and it’s all good, you might be in for a shock.”

The UN weapons inspector trainees will soon feel that shock — or at least a simulated version of it. They’ll do a mock inspection at a live nuclear facility. It’ll be the ultimate test of their judgment, and their ability to work under pressure, before the real job begins.
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