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DOE Pulse
  • Number 357  |
  • February 27, 2012

MINDS detection system finds a military role

Charles Gentile (center), and other members of the MINDS team, including Ken Silber (right) and Bill Davis (left) work on new techniques to identify radionuclides.

Charles Gentile (center), and
other members of the MINDS
team, including Ken Silber (right)
and Bill Davis (left) work on
new techniques to identify
radionuclides.

Spinoffs from military technology have long benefited civilians, producing innovations ranging from fire-retardants to freeze-dried food.

Now scientists at DOE's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have turned that model on its head, making a civilian discovery available for defense use.

That technology is MINDS, which stands for "miniaturized integrated nuclear detection system," a software system designed for the nuclear energy industry that can also find "dirty bombs."

The device has been successfully tested in settings ranging from train stations to airports and major harbors, showing that it can accurately identify threat radiation within seconds without disrupting commerce.

As the U.S. Congress moves toward requiring greater security in the container shipping industry, MINDS could soon play a global role in scanning containers. With that in mind, VeriTainer, an international container security device company in San Francisco, has entered a partnership with MINDCo, Incorporated, an entity marketing the software under an exclusive licensing agreement with Princeton University.

Mounted on a crane at a shipping terminal, MINDS has been used to scan a cargo container in 20 seconds, instantly setting off an alert if it detects something suspicious.

"There's been a lot of resistance to scanning all containers, but with MINDS it's done seamlessly," said Lawrence Alioto, executive vice president of Veritainer. For the scans to become widely accepted there has to be no interruption in the unloading process. "We've tested it at three ports and five terminals so far," Alioto said, "It's worked." The potential market for the container terminal business alone is about 10,000 crane systems in use internationally, he said.

Next up is a handheld version of the system, currently in development, that could put MINDS into still more widespread use.

Another indication of MINDS' potential is interest the system has elicited in Japan, according to Joseph Moran, chief financial officer of InSitech, the corporate parent of MINDCo. The company has gotten inquiries from organizations in Japan that are tracking contamination in the wake of the earthquakes that damaged nuclear power plants there.

"Interest tends to be event-driven," Moran said, "but people who have tested MINDS love it."

Sensitive enough to detect one-billionth the amount of radiation needed to make a weapon and smart enough to identify the radioactive element involved, MINDS has its origins in nuclear safety compliance.

"We used a progenitor of MINDS to decommission our tokamak in 1999,"said PPPL's Charles Gentile, referring to an experimental fusion device once used at the Laboratory. Gentile led the PPPL team that invented MINDS. Before the defunct reactor could be cut into 10 ft by 12 ft chunks, sealed in concrete, and trucked to a government disposal site at Hanford, Washington, federal authorities required tests to accurately account for residual radioactive materials and show there was no longer any dangerous radiation. MINDS proved it could do the job. "We didn't even have a name for it then, but we knew were able to identify very low signals in an active environment," said Gentile, head of tritium systems at PPPL.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security put out a request for systems that could be used to detect radioactive devices. Gentile and colleagues submitted a proposal for MINDS.

With funding from the DOE and the U.S. Army, the software was fine-tuned. That fine-tuning is an on-going process, Gentile said. The effort resulted in the 2005 licensing agreement with InSitech, a company that represents the business interests of the U.S. Army's Armament Research and Development Engineering Center, under an arrangement known as a partnership intermediary agreement. It is based at the U.S. Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, N.J.

With now three patents issued on the software powering MINDS, the system is paired with radiation detection hardware like that made by Veritainer to find radioactivity and instantly reveals what kind of radioactive substance is responsible for the emanation. MINDS can detect -- in seconds -- if a radioactive signal is a threat. It can distinguish, for instance, between a signal from a medical isotope--tracer substances injected in a patient as part of cardiac stress test--from one coming from radiation used to sterilize food, or whether the radiation is a suspicious signal from Cobalt 60 or Cesium 137, substances that are likely candidates for use in weapons.

The system does that by comparing patterns of signals from radioactive particles known as radionuclides to those residing in a computer-based "library" showing patterns given off by less threatening radiation.

Background radiation is more common in the environment than most people likely think, Gentile said.

"There are a lot of medical isotopes used in tests and cancer treatments. Even the clays in kitty litter can give off radiation," he said, as well as some slabs of granite and dyes used in pottery. Red colored Fiesta Ware dishes made in the 1940s have been found to contain traces of uranium, Gentile said. "MINDS can distinguish dangerous radiation from benign with a minimum of false positives," Gentile said.

The U.S. Federal Laboratory Consortium in 2009 honored those involved in MINDS development with an "excellence in technology transfer" award for doing outstanding work in getting federally supported technology to the marketplace. The judging was done by a panel representing members of industry, state and local government, universities, and the federal laboratory system, of which PPPL is a member.

That was gratifying, but so is the work itself, he added. "We are working hard to find people who may be trying damage to our country. A dirty bomb could be devastating. I feel good about what we are doing."

Submitted by DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory