Saturday, April 22, 2006
N.M. Company Aims to Protect Ports
FOR THE RECORD:This story has been corrected to reflect that Global Transshipment Monitorings mobile scanning devices would cost twice as much as existing equipment, not half as much, as stated by CEO Louis Guillebaud. On Monday, company spokesman Glen Loveland said that, in fact, the scanners, which can detect radioactive material, cost $1.5 million each. The company contends they are better than the current scanners because they are mobile and more accurate.
Journal Staff Writer
A New Mexico company this week demonstrated a device its inventors say could eventually scan every shipping container entering the United States for radioactive materials.
Global Transshipment Monitoring aims to build the $1.5 million, 40,000-pound Mobile Point-of-Need Detector System, or M-PONDS, in Albuquerque.
The company could employ as many as 3,000 within the next 10 years, according to CEO Louis Guillebaud.
The company showed off a prototype Thursday of the 25-foot-tall portal for officials from the city, state and federal laboratories assembled at Double Eagle II airport, culminating months of development and testing.
Congresswoman Heather Wilson, R-N.M., and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., watched as company officials repeatedly drove a truck carrying a shipping container between the portal's two massive scanners.
Wilson and Bingaman are working to secure more than $7 million in Department of Homeland Security funding to test the device in the field.
Nearly 50,000 steel shipping containers that arrive at U.S ports are shipped daily by road and rail nationwide.
"One of our biggest threats is the possibility of a nuclear weapon coming in through a container at a port," Wilson said during the demonstration.
Only a small percentage of the containers entering the country are currently scanned, she said.
Recent studies have concurred there are holes in the system.
"It's enough to tell us this is a point of extreme vulnerability," she said, adding later: "This is what keeps me up at night."
In the wake of the failed Dubai Ports deal earlier this year, a group of House Democrats tried to pass legislation calling for scanning every shipping container before departure from ports of origin. Republicans on the House Homeland Security Economic Security Subcommittee rejected the proposal, calling it impossible with current equipment. But Democrats and Republicans on the committee later agreed to require the Department of Homeland Security to test next-generation radiation portal monitors at U.S. seaports receiving a high volume of container cargo.
Bingaman said the M-PONDS device qualified as a next-generation scanner.
Guillebaud said a network of 400 to 600 such portals would be needed to scan every container arriving in the United States. Though there are devices at ports to scan for radiological materials— the ingredients of a so-called "dirty bomb"— they are unreliable and require more personnel to use and monitor, he said.
The wheeled M-PONDS device can be driven to any location, and trucks or other vehicles would drive through it. Suspicious containers would then be checked later, and regular traffic through the port or other shipment facility would not be disrupted.
Company officials said evaluations by various national laboratories found it identified all radioactive test materials and accurately assessed threat levels.
The M-PONDS system uses a spectroscopic scanner developed by Boston-based Thermo Electron Corp., which has a manufacturing plant in Santa Fe that employs 100. Thermo specializes in laboratory instruments and software used in medical and scientific fields.
The Thermo technology for the M-PONDS device was developed at Sandia National Laboratories and is licensed to the company.
Guillebaud said Global Transshipment Monitoring was in negotiations with the Department of Energy to put a prototype device in a U.S. port and in a foreign port— possibly in the Middle East.
AED 
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