The smuggling of fissile material into or out of Canada is a concern. The Canadian Border Services Agency has systems in place to detect low-level gamma radiation but the efficiency of detecting well shielded nuclear materials is very low. While the probability of smuggling a fissile device into Canada is thankfully very low, the consequences could be devastating, so monitoring the transport of these materials - in cargo containers for example, warrants further investigation.

The Canadian team is working on a proof of principle project, to see if the naturally occurring cosmic ray muon flux can be used to detect the presence of high atomic number (high Z) materials. This method applies high energy physics detector techniques to track the muons as they interact with the material. The Carleton group is currently building a full-scale prototype of the proposed detector, and have developed detector technologies which will be used in a new project for detecting mass coronal ejections.