Update: GIS Simulation Tracks Hot Materials to Find Nuclear Efforts
Update 1/19: I contacting Sandia regarding the original PR that mis-defined GIS, it’s since been corrected.
- ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS
Asian News International (ANI) reports that researchers at Sandia National lab are tracking known reports of radiological material to define their distribution and determine where the next nuclear device may appear. The simulation involves GIS (though apparently the reporter is not aware of the definition). More importantly perhaps, the program was turned on an historical event and “got the right answer.” That was in the case of A. Q. Khan’s work in Pakistan.
In the study, York collected and collated data from 800 open-source incidents from 1992 to the present, along with the movement of dual-use items like beryllium and zirconium. He plotted the incidents on a global information system (GIS) software platform and came up with a network of countries and routes between countries indicative of an illicit nuclear and radiological trafficking scheme.
