(Photo: Wired Magazine)

Mobile, Networked Radiation Detectors Help the
Law Find Dirty Bombs -- Wired

LIVERMORE, California — What do you get when you cross California nuclear chemists with New Jersey policemen?

A mobile, and wirelessly networked, radiation detector jammed into the trunk of a Chevy Suburban called the RadTruck.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and their business partners, Textron Defense Systems, demoed the $250,000 trucks yesterday to reporters and revealed they'd been patrolling the streets and sensitive infrastructure of Jersey for the past year.

RadTrucks are able to identify radioactive sources as small as a grain of sand within a dozen feet of its side-mounted detectors while traveling at 45 miles per hour, which makes it particularly useful for monitoring highways.

"It's a spectroscopic system," said Howard Hall, a Livermore nuclear chemist who helped develop the radiation detector. "Most current systems say there's radiation and how much of it there is. This tells you that there's radiation, how much of it and what it is."

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My Comment: I can only hope that in the near future we will have scores of these vehicles everywhere.