New Radiation Detectors Not Worth Their High Price, Says GAO

New and ‘advanced’ radiation portal monitors, which are supposed to detect the presence of dangerous radiological material in vehicles and containers at U.S. seaports and borders, are not worth their $80 million price tag, according to a letter sent today from the Government Accountability Office to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.

The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO), under the Department of Homeland Security, recently spent over $80 million on three new kinds of radiation monitors, all of which had lousy results in field tests, according to the GAO. The purchase is just the first step in a billion-dollar effort to improve portal radiation monitors over the next five years.

The best performing of the new detectors was only able to correctly identify masked highly enriched uranium and depleted uranium 53 percent of the time, the letter asserted. The other two performed even worse, with 45 percent and 17 percent success rates, it continued. Despite the low success rates in their own field tests, DNDO went ahead with an initial purchase.   

"It’s a mystery to me as to why they would take this route," said Jim Schafer, assistant director at the GAO. "It’s baffling."

The DNDO stands by their decision to purchase the monitors and says that further field tests are planned.

The new monitors cost $360,000 each, around seven times what the current models in use cost, and the GAO says it is still unclear whether or not the new models outperform the current ones.

"We don’t even know if these are better," said Schafer. That’s because when the current plastic models were field-tested by DNDO alongside the new models, they were set up incorrectly so the test results were unusable, said Schafer.

The GAO is concerned that once these so-called advanced radiation monitors are deployed, customs and border patrol officers will be overconfident in the technology.

"Customs officials could have a false sense of security that the monitors are working fine and that they do not have to do secondary inspections," said Gene Aloise, Director of the Natural Resources and Environment Department at the GAO. Leaving the door open, according to Aloise, for the monitors to miss detecting dangerous radiological material.

Read the GAO’s full report.