 There are about three million cargo containers going through Canada's ports each year, so ensuring that there's no hidden or illegal materials inside these containers can be a pretty big job. Luckily, detecting nuclear materials hidden inside these containers is about to get a whole lot easier. Cargo containers are big metal boxes. They're about 53 feet long and they can be filled with anything. And there's so many of these things coming through ports of entry into and out of the country every day, every hour, every minute that it's impossible to look inside every single one of them. At Chalk River Laboratories, Andrew's team is working with a technology that will be able to detect hidden nuclear materials inside cargo containers coming across the border. This technology is called Muon Tomography. The Sun's turbulent surface and other objects in space like supernova are constantly spitting out material which hits the Earth's atmosphere, creating particles called muons. Since you started watching this video, thousands of muons have been passing straight through you. In fact, muons pass through most everyday materials. These muons can pass through a very large amount of very dense material, so they can pass kilometres into the Earth before they are stopped. The Muon part explains the type of particles that we're using to actually do this, and the tomography is the type of image reconstruction that we're doing. This apparatus is called CRIPT, which stands for Cosmic Ray Inspection and Passive Tomography. It was created through an innovative partnership between many Canadian institutions to demonstrate the Muon Tomography technology. So what we've done is we've built a two-story large detector which actually is able to track these muons as they enter and exit the detectors. When a muon hits a piece of cargo, it will pass right through in a straight line. Even if there are materials in the way, like say a person, this muon will still pass through in a straight line. If, however, a dense material like a lead casing is inside the cargo, the muon will be deflected. The detector will see a change in the direction and energy of the muon, and know that something is up. Muon tomography imaging is very similar to an X-ray image you might see at airport security. Muons, however, are only stopped by the densest of materials, like, for example, lead. Also, unlike X-ray images, muons are constantly raining down on us from space, which means that no artificial radiation has to be created to get these images. So these particles are coming from essentially outer space and passing through all of our detectors right here, and we're extracting so much information from them. And the only way we can really handle all this information is with what you see here, all these lit up electronics boards, which are constantly time stamping, filtering, coinciding different pieces of information, and sending them to the computer over a local internet. This technology will be able to quickly and effectively find any dense containers that might be shielding nuclear materials passing through Canada's borders. The facilities at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories will allow the team to test their imaging techniques using nuclear materials as well as nuclear shielding onsite. The goal is to have Muon tomography detectors operating at borders across the country, benefiting all Canadians and keeping our borders secure.