Australia has succeeded where the US failed, harnessing magnetic resonance technology to develop a new landmine detector which will help save tens of thousands of lives each year.

CSIRO and Australian resources company RFC Ambrian developed the handheld device that uses the same technology behind MRI machines to detect the molecular structure of explosives in low-metal antitank and antipersonnel minefields.

MRead has been established to commercialise the technology, which has already been trialled in heavily contaminated minefields in Angola, which Diana, Princess of Wales, famously walked through in 1997 as part of her work with Halo Trust.

Halo Trust chief executive James Cowan said the technology would “travel way beyond Angola, with over two million landmines laid in Ukraine since 2022”.

“I am tremendously excited by the results of these trials in Angola – a place which has always been special to HALO thanks to our history with Princess Diana and her son the Duke of Sussex,” he said.

“Landmine clearance needs to be faster, safer, and smarter. This new detector will be key to delivering our mission for a mine-free world.”

MRead chief executive John Shanahan – who like Mr Cowan is a former member of the military, having served as NATO Commanding General in southern Afghanistan – said conventional landmine detectors identified metal, namely the firing pin.

The problem with this technology was that landmine fields are contaminated with lots of other metal including shrapnel, rubbish, nails, parts of exploded vehicles and other debris.

This meant that on average there were 135 detections per bomb, and each detection involves about half an hour’s digging, slowing the pace of landmine clearance.

“There’s over 100 million mines around the world laid in the ground. It’s going to take tens of thousands of years to clear it. It would be an awfully long time,” Mr Shanahan said.

“And when I say an awful long time, out of the 100 million mines about 117,000 are cleared yearly. If that was the static number of 100 million, you could say, well, we’re nibbling away at the problem over 10, 20, 30, 40 decades, we might eventually get somewhere.

“But if you add back in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, particularly Ukraine, then the problem is not static. It is getting worse, substantially worse.”

Mr Shanahan said the US invested “tens of millions of dollars” into magnetic resonance research to develop mine detectors in the mid 2000s for use in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

“But they couldn’t crack the problem, primarily in three areas. Firstly, if you think about the MRI scan, you’ve got that huge tube – that’s not a practical thing to take into minefields, so they couldn’t crack the size,” he said.

“The next thing was temperature differential between the surface and the subsurface. And the further down you go, the more difficult it got to say, ‘is this an explosive content, like a mine, or just a bit of rock?’

“The last one was electronic noise suppression. So you have radio waves going from the local radio station, storms with lightning. It was just too hard, so everyone left the reservation when the money went with the US – except for Australia.”

And Australia was solving a different problem: how to filter out rock from copper and other metals in the mining sector.

“You’ve got 300 tons of rock going down a chute, and 95 per cent of that rock is rock. 5 per cent of that is the actual copper or whatever,” Mr Shanahan said.

That rock is scanned in a similar way that landmine fields need to be scanned, and MRead chief technology officer Nick Cutmore, who spent 40 years at CSIRO, said it had cracked the size, temperature differential and noise suppression problems that led to the US abandoning the project.

“So it’s now gone from the size of an MRI scanner to a handheld detector that you’d be very familiar seeing people going prospecting on the bench, or looking for gold in the outback, or anything in between,” Mr Cutmore said.

The detectors cost about $30,000 to $40,000 and, following a trial in Angola, MRead is developing another prototype and plans to start production in 2026.

Mr Shanahan said the trials proved that the detectors could be effectively used in mine detection after as little as 30 minutes’ training – instead of the usual four weeks – allowing more de-miners to carry out their lifesaving work in less time.

“They looked at the sensor and said, ‘but this is just a press on, press off, to switch on and off, and it tells you metal detected, or mine detected, or not’.”

Funding has been a challenge. MRead chair Rob Adamson said many venture capital funds didn’t want to go near the technology because it could also be used by the military.

“So it’s through private equity effectively. Thai was friends and family and Codan Minelab – the product that John was talking about (used in the mining sector). They’re a large shareholder as well,” Mr Adamson said.

Halo Trust research and development officer Ronan Shenhav said the technology was crucial to restoring land and saving lives.

“Landmines make time stand still. They can lie silent and invisible in the ground for many decades,” Mr Shenhav said.

“Once disturbed they kill and maim civilians, as well as valuable livestock, preventing access to schools, roads, and prime agricultural land.”

This article first appeared in The Australian.

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