I have personally lost about a dozen pocketknives and six pairs of nail scissors to the good folks from TSA at airport security checkpoints, working to make sure that terrorists do not once again attack the U.S. I don’t complain, they’re just doing their job.

But what I am losing sleep over is what isn’t doing its job: the Radiation Monitors at U.S. Ports and Border Crossings, which we now learn are not capable of detecting Highly Enriched Uranium if it’s smuggled into our country.  

Two of the biggest brains at NRDC, Thomas B. Cochran, Ph.D., senior scientist and Wade Green Chair for Nuclear Policy; and Matthew G. McKinzie, Ph.D., senior scientist in the nuclear program, have an article out today in Scientific American that shows that Americans are spending billions for machines that don’t reliably detect the most dangerous nuclear material, making it possible for terrorists to smuggle in the uranium needed to build a nuclear bomb in the United States.

And to think, I was busted trying to bring a coconut back from Jamaica when I was 14. 

In the article, Tom (pictured at left) and Matthew tell the tale of their “coke can,” a slug of depleted uranium about the size of, you guess it, a can of coke, that traveled across the US border undetected by the supposedly-sophisticated detectors you and I bought with our tax dollars to protect ourselves and our families from nuclear terrorism.

Tom and Matthew go to prove that their coke can actually sent out a stronger signal to the detectors than highly enriched uranium would have, and then they reveal some really frightening calculations to show that even a small amount of highly enriched uranium could be used to make a crude bomb that could do massive damage in any U.S. city.  

But don’t fear, Tom and Matthew have a solution, and a pretty sensible one at that. Rather than invest in expensive machines that don’t work, why not spend our money securing the highly enriched uranium that’s strewn about the world, unprotected from terrorists who wish to do us harm? 

There are two paths to making this happen: securing so-called “loose nukes” in other countries and making sure that highly enriched uranium is also under lock-and-key here in the US. To that end, NRDC just filed a petition for rulemaking with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requesting that NRC establish a date after which it would no longer license the civil use of highly enriched uranium or authorize its export. (link)

By doing that, and working with other countries to secure uranium abroad, we would be a lot safer than by buying more detectors that provide nothing but a false sense of security. 

Read all about it here.