Nuclear engineers from Imperial College London are trying to make the world a safer place.
They are using particle physics to try to detect nuclear materials.
Their aim is to one day help border guards make sure nuclear weapons can’t be smuggled across countries.
“It provides the information that officials need, fully automatically, which basically means that if there is a real threat the response will also be much faster” Sakari Ihantola of Imperial College London said.
Experts say the threat of a radio active weapon comes from non-state actors. Criminal groups who want to destabilize governments and harm or frighten people of large scale.
Many border forces around the world currently use detectors. But they’re crude instruments that generate false positives, needlessly slowing traffic and raising questions about their effectiveness.
This new device should be a game changer. It’s smaller, more sensitive amd more mobile than current machines. Put it in the back of a police are, and it will find a radioactive material in passing traffic pinpointing the car or truck carrying the dirty bomb.
Although smuggling dirty bombs or radioactive material isn’t a common crime, it is a threat and it is a pshycological fear of something we can’t see.
Harmful radiation sipping through our bodies and the environment. The new detector is a byproduct of pure Science. Looking at life’s tinniest matter, and made possible only by machine learning.
Artificial Intelligence allows a computer to constantly learn what is dangerous radioactive particle and what isn’t.
After 3 years of work, the engineers and nearly ready to send their detector into the real world. Science helping to make a safer place.
