Zero tolerance
The radioactive threats are real, but the container scanning debate continues. Felicity Landon reports
“In our view, there is no safe level of radioactive exposure and it is better to be safe than sorry.” These are the words of Warren Smith, assistant national secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia. In June, he called on the Australian government to adopt a ‘consistent and rigorous approach’ to testing all cargo arriving from Japan, following the nuclear crisis there.
The same month, a consignment of radioactive tea from Japan was detained by customs officials in France. In May, contaminated containers from Japan were found in the Port of Rotterdam.
Of course, all of these stories were the result of Japan’s tragic earthquake. But totally separately, the Port of Genoa was facing the dilemma of a container that had arrived from Jeddah, transhipped via Gioia Tauro, found to be containing radioactive material.
The container, which originated in Ajman in the UAE, was meant to be carrying 18 tonnes of copper for a consignee north of Genoa. It was not until it was actually on the quayside in the Voltri Terminal that checks detected the presence of Cobalt-60. That was in July 2010 – and as the authorities considered how to dispose of something that some feared was a terrorist weapon, the box remained barricaded by containers filled with stones and water for a whole year.
Finally, with a massive fire and nuclear response team presence and behind a barricade of concrete-filled containers, the box was opened by robot and the Cobalt-60 located. The clean-up operation took a week and involved more than 100 people. Placed in a casket of lead, the Cobalt-60 is expected to be taken to a disposal site in Germany.
Whatever the motivation for its presence in the container, this incident created a very real focus for those involved in scanning policy and technology.
“The Genoa situation has highlighted that all it takes is one container to cause a great deal of disruption and inconvenience at a particular port,” says Andrew Goldsmith, vice president of marketing at Rapiscan. “It also underscores why it is so critical to have systems with very high capabilities in terms of imaging quality and detection capabilities.
“This underlines the value of the transmission X-ray technology that we use, which is effective even at the centre of a densely packed container. When people say why is that important, you can point to what can happen to a port if a threat does emerge. It pays to go with high quality, because of the potential savings of not having to deal with the kind of disruption that Genoa faced. The cost of that disruption is so much greater than the cost of having a better scanning system.”
Joe Alioto, vice president sales at VeriTainer, which specialises in Crane Mounted Solution (CMS) scanning systems, says Genoa, and also the incidents related to radiation-contaminated products from Japan, could all be avoided before they even began, if containers were routinely scanned for radiation at country of origin, using CMS systems. The company’s VeriSpreader uses sensors embedded in the spreader bar to scan the container during every lift.
A similar view was expressed in a report on the Genoa incident by the Environmental Protection Agency of Liguria (ARPAL). It concluded that to avoid future exposure of workers to sources of radiation from shipments of metallic materials, it would be advisable to install radiation monitors on cranes, for real-time monitoring of containers during shiploading and unloading.
Augusto Russo, of the Genoese fire team specialising in nuclear, chemical and biological emergencies, said that if anyone had handled the Cobalt-60 capsule without precautions before putting it into the container, they would probably now be dead. If, however, they had used precautions, “the largest mobilisation in the history of Italian ports has been caused on purpose”.
For Joe Alioto, the real issue is that the container was able to travel from Ajman, across to Jeddah, through Gioia Tauro and into Genoa before anyone detected a problem.
“Genoa is certainly bad news for all of those people that are arguing for a profile-driven security system,” he says. “We firmly believe that CMS scanning at the point of departure is the only solution. As the container is being lifted on to the ship, you can certify to the next trading partner down the line that they are not going to be handling a radioactive container.”
Moving radiological materials through the container supply chain, on purpose or otherwise, is ‘epidemic’, with the container supply chain moving illicit stuff unabated, he says: “And there is virtually no infrastructure whatsoever in place to do anything about it. This is something really bad waiting to happen. There is a real threat of a nuclear device in a shipping container – and yet the industry wants to do this ostrich-head thing.”
Mr Alioto points to figures that show the US was doing 1% country of origin scanning at 9/11, ten years ago; today, the figure is 3.8%.
“There is no doubt about it, I could position myself anywhere on the globe and deliver radiological upload to just about wherever I wanted. If you are not scanning in the country of origin, it means that a radioactive container is on your soil, and handled by ship workers and dock workers, before it is finally scanned at the exit gate – by which time it has been on the port, often surrounded by a residential area, for however many days.”
Last year, the US postponed the requirement for 100% scanning of inbound boxes by at least two years because of technical and funding issues. The 2014 deadline, as it stands, would require any container heading to the US to be scanned for conventional as well as radioactive threats before being loaded at a foreign port.
However, in June this year, US Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano went on record saying that 100% scanning was “probably not the best way to go”. She said Congress was considering a “more layered approach” to container security, a combined system of scanning, data and risk analysis, physical checks and closer co-operation with ports and countries around the world.
“We are no further forward than we were three years ago,” says Mr Alioto. “Why don’t we do something instead of nothing?”
He says a critical consideration is resilience; if there was a ‘dirty bomb’ incident, how would the global supply chain re-start operations based on profiling? “Profiling isn’t a reliable layer of hard security in which you could re-start operations in the wake of an event.”
Source: Port Strategy