The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sent the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine an emergency shipment worth approximately $2.3 million after 29 radiation portal monitors were destroyed in Ukraine in fighting between the government and separatists.
NNSA spokeswoman Francie Israeli offered more details by email after a June 17 Government Accountability Office report highlighted the destroyed equipment.
Israeli said the destroyed monitors were worth $3.9 million and that they had been deployed at six locations in Ukraine and six locations in Crimea. The following emergency shipment in July 2014 of 700 personal radiation detectors cost approximately $400,000, she said; the pagers were deployed at checkpoints near Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
The Border Guards also between June 2014 and March 2015 received eight mobile detection vans worth approximately $1.6 million, five radiation detection backpacks worth about $100,000, and 63 high-sensitivity radiation pagers worth about $200,000, Israeli said.
She noted that the agency’s Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence (NSDD) program has provided approximately 500 radiation portal monitors at vehicle and rail border crossings, airports, and seaports in the country since 2006.
The NSDD program installs large-scale radiation detectors at border crossings and similarly critical locations in foreign nations, and offers partner countries mobile detection system equipment and training to address the threat of nuclear and radiological smuggling.
The NSDD program had partnered with 59 countries as of last October, spending about $1 billion from fiscal 2011 to 2015, according to the GAO.
Israeli previously said the last occurrence of severe nuclear material detection equipment damage from conflict was in Georgia in 2008, during the country’s war with Russia over the breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions. On June 23, she specified that eight radiation portal monitors at three locations in Georgia were severely damaged during this time, and that the NSDD program spent approximately $500,000 to repair and replace this equipment.
