Bogus Company Obtains Nuclear License

i_like_spam writes "As reported in the NY Times, undercover investigators from the Government Accountability Office set up a bogus company and received a license to purchase dirty-bomb nuclear materials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The GAO's investigation shows that the security measures put in place after 911 are not sufficient for protecting the American people." From the article: "Given that terrorists have expressed an interest in obtaining nuclear material, the Congress and the American people expect licensing programs for these materials to be secure, said Gregory D. Kutz, an investigator at the accountability office, in testimony prepared for the hearing."

Terrorism

[pubjames]

I don't think this administration is worried about terrorism at all. Terrorism is just a useful justification for what they do, and keeping the people scared.

The thing that really convinced me of this was how they handled the Iraq war. Leaving aside for a moment that bombing the crap out of people is probably a pretty good way to make new terrorists, they did the following:

1) Failed to secure nuclear facilities in Iraq. (They did however make a big effort to secure the oil wells).
2) Distributed in Iraq, without care or record, twelve billions dollars of Iraqs money in cash.

Are those the actions of an administration that is worried about terrorism? To me, they are the actions of an administration that wants to create them...

The funny thing is

[Jaaay]

that most terrorists of the blow ourselves up kind are too stupid to ever do this in the first place. When you look at a lot of the recent bombings or attempted bombings in London the terrorists had all the advantages and were still too retarded to kill a lot of people as you'd expect they could if they had brains since they have the advantage of surprise and crowded civilians.

Is that all?

[MichaelSmith]

TFA:

The machines include americium-241 and cesium-137

I had access to cesium-137 at college. There wasn't any real security about it. You could probably rip it off it you wanted to. I personally have a cache of americium-241 on a shelf in my garage. Thats where I put old, non-functional smoke detectors. I don't actually know where I can go to get rid of them and I am not stupid enough to put them in the bin so they stay in the garage.

You can't make a nuclear bomb out of these materials. You can certainly make a dirty bomb which will spread the stuff around, but I don't know how bad that is really going to be. It might release radioactivity embarrassingly close to background with any decent coverage.

Re:Law not sufficient

[Mr2cents]

And the dirty bomb scenario is a complete 100% propaganda fabrication. There is no way to disperse enough nuclear material to make it effective. It could happen, but it won't kill anyone from the radiation. It's pure neocon FUD.

Re:The GAO Application

[itsdapead]

Actually those immigration forms foreigners have to fill out upon entering the US are not that far off from your questionaire.

Actually, I used to find those "Are you an evil kitten-huffing war-criminal terrorist? yes/no (If yes, please bribe your local embassy official before travelling)" stupid until I got the point:

Kitten huffing [uncyclopedia.org] and other unamerican practices may or may not be against federal or state law - and attempting to arrest or deport someone for it could run into trouble from pinko liberal hippy lawyers muttering obscenities like "probable cause", "jurisdiction" or "it was all done in Photoshop". However, supplying false information on an immigration form is - praise the lord - very illegal and they can arrest you like mad for that.

Re:Law not sufficient

[stonecypher]

The amount of Americium and Cesium that would be obtained in one of the moisture density devices is so small that you would need THOUSANDS, maybe hundreds of thousands of them to make any kind of 'dirty bomb'.

This would only be true under the relatively unlikely situation that the terrorists were trying to make the bomb entirely out of the salting material, which they aren't. The salt doesn't need to be in much presence; nuclear explosions do a pretty good job of vaporizing and dispersing elements.

The amount of Americium in one analyzer is about the size of a pin head, barely visible to the human eye.

And way, way more than enough to salt a bomb. By the way, maybe you should try reading the article: "But he said the danger associated with the amount of radioactive material the auditors were trying to buy should not be overstated." In fact, the people demonstrating the flaw in control are just as aware that the test they made isn't a nuclear threat as you, some random SlashDot goon, are. That's not actually the point. That said, if you'd bother to check your math, the amount of Americum required is about three quarters of the volume of alpha emitter that was released in the Goiania accident, and the Goiania accident was just two guys carrying around one tiny container of dust. Turns out that a nuclear weapon does a better job of dispersing material than do two excited dudes who don't know why it's bad that their stuff glows in the dark.

By the by, that accident contaminated 250 people, and that's in a weird little rural village with a population of less than nothing. If you just move that to two dudes walking around New York City with an object like that, you're looking at probably several thousand deaths. If you took that capsule and put it on top of a relatively high roof (say, an apartment building or a hotel,) then set up a simple oscillating desktop fan, you're looking at more deaths than any terrorist attack in US history (maybe in global history, not really sure.)

That amount of alpha emitters nice and charged/distributed by a thermonuclear explosion? Yeah, you're just wrong about thinking that's not terrifying.

The point is that the NRC is supposed to investigate everyone. Nobody should have been able to get anything, no matter how innocuous. The purpose of the exercise wasn't to attempt to acquire a dangerous level of material, but simply to show that virtually no effort was required to circumvent these regulations. Amusingly, the reason this worked is almost certainly because there was someone like you at the helm, making nasty comments about how harmless the materials are, and deciding to save themselves some time and just pass the damn thing.

The reality of it is that I can take Americium and hold it in my hands.

Yep. Cobalt too. That really doesn't have much to do with the danger involved. Many extremely dangerous things can be held in your hands, including C4 and U238. I'd ask what your point was, but I think you were just trying to pretend that fissile alpha emitters aren't dangerous because one of the situations that doesn't poison you to death is being in contact with the material.

Or did you think the bomb salts were about something other than chemical toxicity?

But he said the danger associated with the amount of radioactive material the auditors were trying to buy should not be overstated.

Well, if they took the time to powder the Americum first, they could just use a traditional chemical explosive to distribute it. Timothy McVeigh managed. Turns out that normal bombs aren't that hard to make. Sure, that wouldn't matter much with Americum, but Americum has the exact same okay process as the other materials the NRC stores, including thorium and polonium. Get those as powders in a traditional bomb, and you've got a several mile cloud of you're-dead-in-three-days.

It turns out that the peo

Re:Law not sufficient

[darkwhite]

The natural occurence of uranium is 300 microgram to 11.7 milligram per kg. So I doubt it will be that harmful.

Natural uranium is almost all U-238, which is relatively harmless (2 OOM lower radiation than U-235). Why do you think the link between depleted uranium (all U-238, no U-235) and health problems is not proven? Spent nuclear fuel is far more enriched than natural uranium. Also, natural uranium is locked into the soil. Contaminant uranium will presumably be in the air and on the surface, making it a lot more troublesome. Finally, uranium of any form is by far not the most hazardous radioactive material out there.

How much of this material would leave a 100-200m radius of the blast you think?

It's not that easy. Why do you think there's an exclusion zone around Chernobyl? Less than 60 tons of fuel got ejected from that reactor, and the exclusion zone is 30 km in radius. That increases as the square root of the fuel mass, so for a 1 km radius you apparently need less than 100 kg of enriched fuel, though I'm not sure how to estimate that amount in spent fuel. The fuel from Chernobyl wasn't deliberately dispersed, either. Only about 2 tons got ejected into the air and almost all of that settled within the zone, yet the immediate spike in radioactivity in all of Europe anywhere near downwind was massive. All that it needed was some wind. A terrorist detonating a dirty bomb would of course try to use the wind to maximum advantage.

Yes, it would have to be pretty heavy. Blowing up several hundred kg of powdered nuclear waste above a city isn't easy, but it's nothing a Cessna and an equal amount of explosives can't do.

How long would it take some people with a vacuum cleaner to clear up the mess?

Try cleaning a forest with a vacuum cleaner sometime. A city is not at all easier. Washing it down helps, but not when there's a lot of it. I agree that there wouldn't be many deaths and the exclusion zone wouldn't be large - several km^2 at most - but that's still massive when it's in the middle of a downtown area.

That's why I think it's very doubtful it would be effective.

Neither my analysis nor yours, nor that of anyone less than a team of nuclear engineers and security experts, is adequate. I've never seen an adequate study of the dirty bomb threat. I'm not sure what the DHS is up to, but if they're seriously working on this, they're keeping awfully quiet about it. Given the amount of publicity their other programs receive and the quality of their grants I've seen so far, I'm not hopeful. There's some program to install container scanners in ports, but all we keep hearing is that it inspects a tiny fraction of cargo.

What infuriates me is the useless security measures everywhere and the people who use the T-word to further their agendas. Then people fed up with that start conflating real, actionable threats with the avalanche of fearmongering bullshit. I think that's happening with this topic.