I don’t know if this story is true or not, but I just read this article:
Radioactive cat mistaken for bomb
and I was wondering if anyone knew anything about this particular program? I’ve never personally heard of anti-terror police sitting on the highways with radiation detection equipment.
It’s been going on for a while. I’m not sure how they decide who gets the radiation detectors. They can detect nuclear material, people/animals that have been treated with radioisotopes, contaminated steel, and bananas.
Kitty liter, pacemakers, the usual.
Some mistakes are to be expected as new program gets settled in. It seems detectors have been placed along major highways leading toward major cities (which ones don’t?). Now many years into the program, there ought to be thousands of the things.
Huh, I’d never really heard of the program at all. Are these guys feds? Local? What are they exactly?
New stories indicate a state trooper pulls over a bus full of radioactive seniors (or whatever) looks around and apologizes.
I suppose Federal funding and local monitoring. Or not. I am almost guessing here.
Links are few and far between. Here is something from a British paper. A short bit of that:
Since 9/11, the US Government has installed over a thousand detectors inside its own country, but the technology has proved far from perfect. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reported in 2005 that it was getting about 150 false alarms a day from its 22 radiation portals. The culprits range from contaminated scrap metal to bananas, which contain naturally radioactive elements.
There’s a discussion of the history of the programme and its likely effectiveness in this long article by Steve Coll in The New Yorker from last year.