WASHINGTON — In an event that was part photo-op, part celebration, and part power networking, senior Department of Energy officials mixed with Capitol Hill staffers, think-tankers, and the press on Tuesday to mark the 20th anniversary of the Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence (NSDD) program.
Born from a need to prevent proliferation of the Soviet stockpile after the Iron Curtain fell, and formerly known as Second Line of Defense, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) NSDD program helps other countries track the illicit movement of potentially dangerous radiation sources.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty kicked off the program, which included panel discussions with government officials from three countries — Cambodia, Georgia, and Mexico — that have relied on NSDD to provide equipment and training for local and national law enforcement officials tasked with preventing the spread of radioactive material.
“Over the past five years, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Incident and Trafficking Database recorded over 250 incidents involving theft, unauthorized possession, or other criminal activities related to nuclear and radioactive materials,” Gordon-Hagerty said in her opening remarks. “So much progress has been made over the last few decades to secure radioactive and nuclear materials … however, these materials remain prevalent throughout our world.”
Among the high-ranking attendees from the U.S. national nuclear security enterprise were the directors of the Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. The labs have all worked on nuclear detection technologies, or contributed to fundamental research and development to support those technologies.
The NSDD program aims to halt the spread not only of special nuclear materials that could be used to build nuclear weapons, but also industrial and medical radiation sources such as cesium-137 that could be employed in so-called dirty bombs: devices designed to disperse harmful radiation sources using conventional explosives.
To date, the program has helped field roughly 800 detectors to more than 70 nations, according to an NNSA press release.
Congress has favored the NSDD program and is poised, for the second year in a row, to provide more funding than the NNSA requested.
For the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, the NNSA asked a little more than $140 million for Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence, or about $12 million less than the 2019 budget. Just before the Tuesday event, the House Appropriations Committee approved a spending bill that would give the program more than $155 million.
With its 2020 budget, the NNSA nuclear smuggling prevention program plans, among other things, to deploy mobile radiation detection stations “to help counter the threat of illicit trafficking of special nuclear Material … in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa,” according to the agency’s 2020 budget request.
