Prevent Nuclear Terror
Collecting plutonium or highly enriched uranium is the main barrier to a terrorist to plan a nuclear attack. The first danger is highly enriched bomb-grade uranium produced for reactor might be diverted to terrorists. Besides, the second danger is the synthetic plutonium which is radioactive hazard in itself and a good fuel for nuclear bombs. Therefore, nuclear security is one of the most urgent policy issues in the 21st century. Besides its political and institutional aspects, it also poses acute technical issue. However, there are still many challenges of nuclear security like how to protect the materials, how to detect it especially at a distance, how to make a potential device harmless, emergency response, cleanup, and public communication after a nuclear attack and determining the attacker. The third danger is terrorists could create a more powerful homemade bomb with help from renegade professional designers. Responding to such homemade bomb involve engineering challenges ranging from monitoring to cleanup, of both people and places. Other than the challenges above, ensuring a nation using nuclear using nuclear power for energy does not extract plutonium for bomb building is also a touch challenge. In fact, a possible solution of the nuclear security’s problems is to develop a passive device which placed close to a reactor which able to show any removal of plutonium. It is better if the device could detect signs that the reactor was being used to maximize plutonium production instead of power. The second solution to prevent the transportation of fissile material is the “nuclear car wash”. It consist a complex scanning system that containers would pass by while on a conveyor belt. With the intelligence of systems and engineers, and understanding of nature’s nuclear secret through researches, these challenges can be overcame in the 21st century.
References
National Academy of Engineering (NAE). (2008). Prevent nuclear terror. (n.d.). Retrieve October 1, 2008, from http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9134.aspx
2 comments:
Hey~ You wrote a very good summary. You're able to extract all the main ideas and supporting details from the text and put them in your own words. I can easily highlight all the challenges from your summary without reading the full original text!Bravo to you!!
Yik Zheng
The structure of the summary is good. The challenges and solutions are stated in an ordered manner. I am able to understand it easily.
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