The U.S. Border Patrol begins using a $10 Million system this week that can tell what is in a trucks payload in 10 minutes using something called Pulsed Fast Neutron Analysis. The machine, made by Ancore of Santa Clara, California, not only creates a 3-D view it actually labels the parts as seen in this image on Ancore's website. It not only detects explosives, but drugs and other illegal contriband as well

There's an article on wired that goes into more detail on the way it works, but this quote is noteworthy.

Doug Brown, a nuclear physicist who now works as Ancore's vice president of business development, calls the technology a "quantum leap," comparing its advantages to those of MRIs.

"If you have a brain lesion, you can X-ray the hell out of your head and you will see the sockets for your eyeballs, your jawbone and your teeth, but you get no clue whether you have a lesion in your soft tissue," Brown said. "An MRI, on the other hand, is able to locate that lesion in three dimensions, based on a signature that is different in the lesion than in the healthy tissue. Our technology works exactly the same way.

"A lot of threats are packed in barrels. An X-ray of a barrel would simply show a full barrel but wouldn't tell you it was full of water, oil or explosives," Brown said. "PFNA can determine what is in barrels."

This is simply incredible and if it truly is reliable enough this could solve a lot of issues regarding not only the border but our ports and possibly airplanes. You probably can't use it on humans, but you could load a planes baggage and run it through one of these things before people board.

The sad part of this is that it does use radiation, which I'm sure some liberal group will rally against even if it effectively increases our protection 100 fold.

My Beltway Traffic Jam for today.