The Optimal Spatiotemporal Deployment of Radiation Portal Monitors Can Improve Nuclear Detection at Overseas Ports

Radiation portal monitors are starting to be deployed at overseas ports to prevent nuclear weapons from entering the U.S. in a shipping container. Current designs have containers on trucks passing through a portal monitor at approximately 10 mph, before being routed to one of several lanes at the port's front gate for a driver identification check. For a fixed cost of testing, which consists of the costs of radiation portal monitors plus offsite x-ray and possibly manual testing of containers generating a false radiation alarm that cannot be resolved by gamma-ray imaging, the neutron detection limits of the current design are compared with those of two other designs that do not affect truck congestion at the front gate. For a wide range of budgets, it is optimal to have six monitors in each lane that simultaneously test a truck while it is being processed at the front gate. This design is robust against the location (within the container) of the weapon and reduces the detection limit (relative to the current design) by approximately a factor of three (although the accuracy of this value is limited by the lack of publicly available data) for practical budgets, which is enough to offset some shielding for a plutonium weapon, but insufficient to detect an uranium weapon.

Article access: Taylor & Francis Online | Free PDF