Two dirty bombs passed through the Washington and Texas state borders into the United States last year in an experiment to determine how good our border security really is. I guess the answer is we still have plenty of work to do.
Undercover investigators slipped radioactive material enough to make two small “dirty bombs” across U.S. borders in Texas and Washington state in a test last year of security at American points of entry.
Radiation alarms at the unidentified sites detected the small amounts of cesium-137, a nuclear material used in industrial gauges. But U.S. customs agents permitted the investigators to enter the United States because they were tricked with counterfeit documents.
The Bush administration said Monday that within 45 days it will give U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents the tools they need to verify such documents in the future.
The Government Accountability Office’s report, the subject of a Senate hearing Tuesday, said detection equipment used by U.S. customs agents to screen people, vehicles and cargo for radioactive substances appeared to work as designed.
But the investigation, carried out simultaneously at both border crossings in December 2005, also identified potential security holes terrorists might be able to exploit to sneak nuclear materials into the United States.
“This operation demonstrated that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is stuck in a pre-9/11 mind-set in a post-9/11 world and must modernize its procedures,” Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said Monday in a statement.
The NRC, in charge of overseeing nuclear reactor and nuclear substance safety, challenged that notion.
“Security has been of prime importance for us on the materials front and the power plant front since 9/11,” commission spokesman David McIntyre said in an interview.
