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SEDS, LLC and Adelphi Technology, Inc. Humanitarian Demining the Smart Way
Wayne B. Norris, Chief Scientist, SEDS, LLC 805-962-7703 V 805-456-2169 F 2534 Murrell Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93109-1859 [email protected] http://SEDS-LLC.com
It Started with Finding Bombs • Neutron Activation is the best way to find
explosives. Both interrogation and response signals penetrate most overburden.
• There are challenges – but ALL HAVE BEEN OVERCOME, with FOUR PATENTS AWARDED [7,573,044, 8,080,808, 8,288,734, and 8,357,910] and THREE PENDING.
• SEDS works with strategic partner Adelphi Technology of Redwood City, the world’s leading source for “D-D” neutron sources [explained below].
• The technologies developed by SEDS for finding explosives, along with Adelphi’s enabling neutron technologies, will lead to HUGE additional potential opportunities in humanitarian de-mining.
• Additional applications exist in agriculture, minerals, coal, and cement industries, and also in security, medicine, and materials science.
Humanitarian de-Mining Opportunity Large parts of the earth are denied to human occupation as a result of land mines remaining from prior conflicts. Exhaustive removal is required before repopulation, since the acceptable casualty rate for remaining mines is, essentially, zero. Numerous strategies have been and are currently being used for detection of these mines. The originally-proposed SEDS / Adelphi system, with its enormous neutron flux, simplicity of operation, long range [to several meters], high speeds [to several km/hr], and robotic profile, is a potential game-changer in humanitarian demining.
• Large-area, low-cost gamma ray detectors: – Up to 1 Square Meter of collection area – Better than 0.1 radian angular resolution – Better than 5% energy resolution at 10 MeV – Manufacturing costs under USD ½ million
• Deuterium-Deuterium [“DD”] neutron sources: – High-flux: up to 1012 2.6 MeV neutrons/sec – Highly agile:
• Flux variable over 6 orders of magnitude [60 dB] under modulation envelopes with frequencies to 1 KHz
• Pulse rates to 10 KHz at 60 dB – Portable / small form factor – Extremely long component life [thousands of hours] – Completely non-radioactive when turned OFF – Conventional D-T (radioactive) sources also available
• Patented control systems for up to 50 dB gain in Signal/Noise Ratio [SNR] when used together.
• SEDS – Founded in 2005 – Laboratory models of telescope
components have been built – Testing has yielded excellent results – 4 Patents have been issued and 3 are underway – Investment is sought to continue development
• Adelphi – Founded in 1988 – Approximately 7 patents current – 8 employees – 5 FTEs – Multiple devices shipped – Government contracts active – Customers waiting for productization – Investment is sought to productize for market
Current Status • SEDS has invested $4 million, has four patents
issued – US 7,044,529, 8,080,808, 8,288,734, and 8,357,910 – and three more in progress, is $1,000,000 away from a prototype, and $2 million away from a shippable product.
• Adelphi is funded by grants and SBIRs for R&D and some commercial sales and has a shippable product line.
• The Boards of both firms are actively seeking partners.
Wayne B. Norris, Chief Scientist, SEDS, LLC 805-962-7703 V 805-456-2169 F 2534 Murrell Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93109-1859 [email protected] http://SEDS-LLC.com
Agricultural Opportunity Economical use of fertilizers and soil nutrients requires that existing levels of these items in soil be measured to avoid under- or over-application. Current best practices are limited to physical sampling followed by either onsite or, more commonly, remote laboratory analysis. The originally-proposed SEDS / Adelphi system, with autonomous operation, simplicity of use, and ability to cover large areas quickly, is a potential game-changer in agricultural soil analysis.
Minerals Opportunity Rapid, remote elemental assay of ores [“remote sniffing”] allows expensive mining operations to focus on proven “pay dirt”. The presence and concentrations of the elements shown below can be reported, in real time, from a robotic analysis vehicle moving up to 5 km/hr.
Ores can be up to ½ meter below the surface and up to 5 – 10 meters from the vehicle. Included are elements typically present in low concentrations that are either commercially valuable or are required to be monitored in many jurisdictions. • Related technology has been used for more than 50 years by Schlumberger. We are more
advanced. • Rare Earths [15 elements usually found together],
Coal and Cement Opportunity • Both coal and cement feedstocks must be monitored at their
respective plants in real-time, at high rates of delivery, for concentrations of both key ingredients and also contaminants.
• More than 10,000 neutron systems are in use around the world for this purpose. All use the radioisotope 252Cf, which is hazardous even when the machine is OFF, has a lifetime of about 5 years, and remains extremely dangerous even when retired. Moreover, 252Cf production in the US will soon be halted.
• The Adelphi system nearing completion is plug-compatible to replace the 252Cf sources in all commercial systems, and will have a Total Cost of Ownership [“TCO”] lower than that of 252Cf sources
• Potential world wide market is in the USD many tens of millions range with approximately 20 B2B customers who market coal and cement analyzers currently.
• The R&D work is currently supported by a National Science Foundation [NSF] grant.
neutrons and emits an alpha particle: 10B + 1n 7Li + 4He {“α particle”}
• The alpha particle is extremely damaging to tissue, but also has extremely short range [only one cell diameter!]
• Thus, if a boron-loaded drug that seeks out cancerous cells could be administered, and the tumor then exposed to a high flux thermal neutrons, the cancer would be killed non-invasively.
• Sufficient thermal neutron flux is only available from nuclear reactors until the Adelphi Technology DT source becomes available. This source can be located anywhere.
• Development is nearing completion. R&D is happening in Italy and Finland, including selection of the appropriate boron-laden drug.
• Commercial potential is in the high tens of millions of USD.
Medical Radioisotope Opportunity • The most widely administered medical radioisotope in the world is 99mTc. It is injected into patients, and their circulatory systems
are imaged by using its 140 KeV gamma radiation. With a 6-hour half-life, it decays quickly enough so as not to pose undue health risks.
• More than 50,000 doses are administered worldwide per day, accounting for more than 85% of all medical radioisotopes. Wholesale cost is $10 to $20 per dose.
• 99mTc is currently produced by irradiating a boule of HIGHLY ENRICHED, WEAPONS-GRADE URANIUM-235 [“HEU”] in one of a very limited number of highly specialized nuclear reactors in the world for about a week, then removing and processing the boule using wet chemistry, and rapidly airlining the resulting radiopharmaceutical to destinations worldwide, since the boule has only about a 66-hour lifetime.
• The current supply of HEU comes mostly from dismantled stocks of US and former Soviet nuclear warheads. The systems is rife with political, security, and industrial problems and issues.
• This process has too many dangerous, dirty, and scary parts to list. • As time progresses and weapons stocks shrink, the system will have to change dramatically • A perfect solution is to substitute Depleted Uranium [“DU”] – technically 238U – for the HEU
– The extraction chemistry is THE SAME as for HEU – DU **CANNOT** be used for a bomb, and is only barely radioactive, with a half life of 6 **BILLION** years. It can be shipped and used
with few or no restrictions. – DU **CANNOT** be converted to 99mTc in a reactor, but it **CAN** be converted in a very-high-flux neutron beam from a DT source. – Adelphi is the only firm even remotely close to having such a source. – Such a source could be located anywhere in the world. Every city over 2 million is an economic candidate.
• Whenever governments are involved, problems can exist, but the potential revenues are in the hundreds of millions of USD over a mature product life cycle.