Bogus Company Obtains Nuclear License 247
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."
The GAO Application (Score:5, Funny)
Name: Fakey McNukesTheWhales
Organization: The Organization Against Liberal Rags (TOALR)
Use (check all that apply):
- X Academic
- X Business
- _ Terrorism
Intended goals (from above use):Section Two: Behavioral
Question One: You are walking down the street and you see a box of puppies. Do you
- _ Take the puppies home and sell them for profit.
- X Hug the puppies and love them until you can find their owner.
- _ Curb stomp the puppies
Question Two: You are approached by a man claiming to be from Nigeria offering you nuclear warheads with green, white & red striped flags on them. Do you- X Ask the man for his name and inform the NRC of his proposition.
- _ Buy his warheads and forget he ever said anything about his nationality.
- _ Curb stomp the man
Question Three: You enter a voting booth on election day but don't know any of the candidates. Do you- _ Vote Democrat.
- X Vote Republican.
- _ You're too busy to vote.
--For Internal Office Use Only:
X Approved _ Rejected
See, they only answered one question wrong (the correct answer for Question Two in Section Two was the third option), the system works!
Re:The GAO Application (Score:4, Funny)
* _ College Prank
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Re:The GAO Application (Score:4, Funny)
Not quite. The correct answer for question one, section two is, of course, #1. Only liberal socialist commie hippies would pass up a chance for profit.
Re:The GAO Application (Score:4, Funny)
"Train them as hunting dogs"
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Re:The GAO Application (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That's only if you are foolish enough to try to come in by air or sea.
If you just come run across our southern border....there are no questionaire or questions asked. You won't be fingerprinted, or cataloged or have a background check.
And you won't get sent home either if you get caught.
Frankly, I don't know why anyone bothers with coming directly into the US by land or sea if
Re:The GAO Application (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if you refined the uranium it wouldn't likely be a "dirty bomb" but would be actually the better known A-Bomb (well, after rearranging the insides a bit). The reason for the dirty bomb panic is that they use raw, unrefined fissile material, making them easier for terrorists to theoretically obtain. The problem with dirty bombs however is that the aformentioned raw, unrefined fissile material isn't overly dangerous unless in huge quantities. This is since it's too old and stable for many of the freaky-dangerous isotopes to exist since they have tiny half lives. Only the fallout from a REAL nuclear blast or some very fresh waste from a poorly designed reactor is potent enough to be dangerous in the thin spread you get from explosive dispersal. I guess enrichment, with its higher u235 count would be more effective, though U235 does not have the same zing as some of the crazy stuff you could get if you just made it reach critical mass.
Re:The GAO Application (Score:5, Funny)
I wouldn't be showing off my knowledge of dirty bombs (if I had such knowledge) (which I don't) (...nor will I ever) (I love America).
Re:The GAO Application (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The GAO Application (Score:4, Informative)
Citing Wikipedia, the world's primary repository of half-knowledge, the apparent traditional list of salts for a bomb is this: americium-241, californium-252, caesium-137, cobalt-60, iridium-192, plutonium-238, polonium-210, radium-226 and strontium-90. I can tell you from personal knowledge that p238 is an extremely poor choice for a salt due to its half life (hundreds of thousands of years - we do want to colonize Russia after we're done nuking it back into the stone age.) It's also interesting that they misspelled cesium.
Cobalt 60 is the canonical bomb salt (hence "cobalt bomb.")
Next time you want to converse about nuclear physics, think real hard; if you learned it from Anne Coulter or Action Comics, chances are you'll look smarter staying quiet.
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You have fulfilled the rule that every arrogant correction contains a glaring misteeke.
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Definitely a Nexus 6.
Law not sufficient (Score:5, Insightful)
The GAO's investigation shows that the security measures put in place after 911 are not sufficient for protecting the American people.
When are people going to get this. The laws existing before (insert grand public hysteria event here) were sufficient. There is a difference between needing to increase the strength of the laws, thereby weakening civil liberties, and properly and thoroughly enforcing the laws which are already in place.
Re:Law not sufficient (Score:4, Insightful)
The reality of it is that I can take Americium and hold it in my hands. It's an alpha emission radioactive isotope, meaning the first layer of dead skin on my hands would be enough to block the radioactivity.
This is a scare article, designed to make the Bush administration look incompetent.
They forgot to mention that actually making the bomb EXPLODE would involve an entire process that would probably have sent off flags from other governmental agencies. They don't mention it because they were never going to build a bomb, and besides it looks 'scary' that the Nuclear Regulatory Committee allowed the license to potential terrorists rather than the Department of Agriculture allowing the purchase of a ton of fertilizer.
Why don't they publish an article on how you are being RADIATED every time you fly in an airplane? Or how about every time you go to the airport, you get NUKED by the metal detector!! Oh my we should ban all RADIATION it's going to be made into DIRTY BOMBS by terrorists and the Bush/Republicans/White Male Americans who are complicit since they caused 9/11!!!!!!eleven1!12!
Please...
Re:Law not sufficient (Score:5, Informative)
as to the americium, did you hear of the boy scout that made a working breeder reactor largly from old smoke detectors and coleman lantern mantles?
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.htm
-nB
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This is a scare article... Why don't they publish an article on how you are being RADIATED every time you fly in an airplane? Or how about every time you go to the airport, you get NUKED by the metal detector!! Oh my we should ban all RADIATION it's going to be made into DIRTY BOMBS by terrorists and the Bush/Republicans/White Male Americans who are complicit since they caused 9/11!!!!!!eleven1!12!
Indeed. I hereby propose renaming 9/11 to 9/!!. It makes much more sense like that.
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The Radioactive Boyscout [dangerousl...tories.org] I have never been sure if I should be impressed by this kids intelligence and ingenuity or a little nervous about the possibilities.
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No, the article demonstrates an example of administration incompetence. There is a law on the books. It may not be a good law, but it's there. The administration's duty is to execute the laws, and the article outlines a failure of that duty. Does it rise to the level of their other failures? Not really.
I would agree that anyone playing this up as a real security hole is using scare tactics.
Re:Law not sufficient (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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?
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 (Score:5, Funny)
" The idea with the terrorist dirty bomb would not be to get it to explode it would be to wrap the radioactive material around a conventional explosive get around helicopter height in a city with skyscapers and then explode it. The material would be embedded in the walls of the building or shatter glass and be enbedded in the floors and interior walls of the building; and possibly people.
Then based on the anthrax attacks it would require that the building be destroied. It would be the perfect terrorist attack, fiarly easiy to do provided you have the materials, and huge amount of destruction.
Screw the nuclear crap. Just hose the building in dioxin [wikipedia.org] or ricin [wikipedia.org]. There's a reason why biologicals have been called "The Poor Man's Nuke."
Or you could use [REDACTED] along with [REDACTED] and really cause a panic. Just [REDACTED], and make sure you [REDACTED]; then just dump [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] or [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] near any convenient [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] - and run like hell.
Hold on, there's some suits from the [REDACTED] who want to talk with me ...
Re:Law not sufficient (Score:5, Insightful)
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you don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
6 years after 9/11 we still have front page news stories about the air quality degradation of downtown manhattan in the weeks after 9/11. then epa chief whitman testifying last month [app.com], michale moore taking 9/11 rescue workers to cuba [app.com]. a son of one of the workers who died from that went to the state of the union address [wikipedia.org]
catch my drift yet?
the people killed on 9/11 are dead and buried. almost 3,000 of them. even the dust from the event is all washed away. and yet the air quality issue lives on, and continues to involve us 6 years later. how many died from the dust? definitely or not? a dozen? a dirty bomb wouldn't have to kill a single person. at the moment of the explosion or ever from the radioactivity
it's all psychological, which is the whole point of terrorism in the first place
now imagine the ongoing media and societal handwringing that would go on with radioactive contamination. no matter how minimal. even if no one died. this is called terrorism. this is called fear. to paraphrase stalin ("a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic"): the endless fretting over a nebulous, low grade continuous degradation to your health, for years, is a more effective terrorist tool than outright killing thousands of people in one sudden event that is then permanently over. radioactive contaimination is not uddenly over. even if the contamination is tiny and insignificant scientifically, you are not thinking about human psychology and how fear works
furthermore, i would like to add that if you are a liberal, and you downplay the effects of terrorism and hype the effects of government abuses, you fail. and if you are a conservative, and you downplay the effects of government abuses, and hype the effects of terrorism, you fail
the only intellectual and morally honest position is to worry about BOTH terrorism and government abuses. to downplay one or the other is intellectually dishonest, and means you are just another lousy biased partisan. terrorism is real and dangerous. government abuses are real and dangerous. anyone who sits there and tries to argue against simple human fear of either government abuses or terrorism has instantly achieved a state of losing the argument and missing the point
well yeah (Score:2)
in other words, the H. L. Mencken quote is interesting only to people who don't understand human nature
it's like saying "sex is for making children, but people do it for other reasons". well duh. the observation is interesting only to 10 year olds, because only 10 year olds don't know this
in the same way, the H. L. Mencken quote is revelatory to people who hold onto some na
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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 t
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Were they?
If it's harder now to obtain a bogus nuclear license, then the pre-existing laws were insufficient, but the new laws are also insufficient.
If it's the same difficulty, then the pre-existing laws were still insufficient.
If it's easier now, there's something seriously wrong.
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The ultimate solution: government agencies should bomb people threatened to be bombed by terrorists in advance, to not allow terrorists blow them up first. Hahah! Take that, terrorists!
I just couldn't underst
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The problem with the "inside job" scenarios isn't whether they're true or not - its that this government is so totally ^@%$@'ed up that they are believable to a large percentage of the population.
I mean, where else can a d
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Coke-heads? Hell, Bolivia just elected a coca grower as president.
And there's always been plenty of drunks getting elected to high office. Winston Churchill was a heavy boozer all his life, and didn't make any particular effort to hide it. (One night at an official ball of some sort, he was confronted by a female MP, who said: "Sir Winston! You are drunk!" - to which he replied: "Yes, I am. And you, madam, are ugly. But tomorrow mornin
Where have they been? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Obvious solution (Score:4, Insightful)
blue zig AYB. (Score:4, Funny)
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"Im in ur Nuclear Regulatory Commission discrediting ur security measures"
Now that's one hell of a cat.
Dirty Bomb? (Score:4, Informative)
It's just another piece of government propaganda to keep the population scared.
One of the reading rooms of the university library (previously a chemistry lab) was way more dangerous - both mercury and asbestos. I bet near any highway in the average metropolis there's way more carcinogenic shit in the air than from any mythical 'dirty bomb'.
Re:Dirty Bomb? (Score:5, Funny)
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One is made by Fox, one isn't. That ought to be a bit of a pointer.
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I don't think so. AFAIR most likely dirty bombs would be pretty harmless, but that's not the point - People are scared of radiation (they don't need government help with that), which is what makes even a 'harmless' dirty bomb effective in terms of the panic it would cause. Not to mention the economic cost of evacuating the area and the clearing up every little scrap of radiation.
MOD parent UP (Score:2)
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Remember, there goal is not to cause fear and panic in the American people, it's to further their rather narrow political aims(Get America to cease control of the Suez Canal, impose Sharia-ish law in most of the middle east, create a independent Palestinia
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Al-Qaeda blowing up a building doesn't change the US policy toward the Jewish state; all it does is provoke a counter attack, and the sense that someone out there wants to kill us for no reason.
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received a license to purchase... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd kind of expect that just filling in the "Dirty-bomb materials licence form" would lead to instant arrest.
I know the solution (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:I know the solution (Score:4, Funny)
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Terrorism (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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The what?
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Ok, I don't like bush either, but you're dumb. (Score:2)
The whole problem with the justification for invading Iraq was that there WERE NO NUCLEAR FACILITIES IN IRAQ!
2) Distributed in Iraq, without care or record, twelve billions dollars of Iraqs money in cash.
How else would you distribute the money? Iraq doesn't exactly have a banking system or an ATM network.
I dislike the Bush administration as much as the next guy. But that's no reason to manufacture
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Protection from what exactly (Score:4, Informative)
Have you RTFAed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot editor has not:
We always complain about government making lives (and business) harder for no reason. Well, getting "interviewed" by the commission, or having to submit pictures of the office and the list of employees to obtain such insignificant quantity of radioactive material could well be argued to be unduly burdensome.
Note, that the "serious consequences" are acknowledged by the article to be largely "economic" ones. Well, having to verify every such application would, likely, have much more of an economic impact. The article laments, that the bogus receiver of the license "had no offices, Internet site or employees. Its only asset was a postal box." So? Do we really want "having an office" to become a requirement for anything?..
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I'm not one to freak out at the mention of the N-word (no not that one, the one they rhymes with heckler) but there is a pretty good reason for the NIOSH (I think that's the regulatory agency anyway) standards for handling nuclear material. I think it stands to reason that if you don't have a facility licensed to use, store,
The funny thing is (Score:2, Interesting)
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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
Their experience as doctors is that people are forever hurting themselves in bizarre ways. Blowing themselves up in Barbecue accidents with propane bottles, etc. It should be so easy to help the process along a little bit and kill hundreds of people.
Of course, it really isn't that easy to kill people. Not their fault they didn't know that. Lets be thankful they weren't engineers like the Malaysian terrorists who did the Bali bombings.
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John Smeaton ( national hero ) has this message for any terrorists he or his countrymen come across
"This is Glasgow we'll just set about you"
Personally John himself has, famously, tackled one of the terrorists himself, this is what he says about it
"Me and other folk were just tryin ta get the boot in and some other guy banjoed him !"
Re:The funny thing is (Score:5, Funny)
America:"Oh my God! there was a man on fire, he was running about, i just
ran for my life..i thought i was gonna die,he got so close to me"
Glasgow: "C*nt wis running aboot on fire,so a ran up 'n gave him a good
boot,then decked him"
America:"I just wanna get home,away from here..i just wanna get home,i
thought i was gonna die"
Glasgow:"here shug, am no leaving here till am oan a f*ckin' plane!"
America:"there was pandemonium,people were running in all directions, we
didn't know what was happening, I thought i was gonna die"
Glasgow:"F*ck this fir a kerry oan,moan we ll get a pint in"
America:"We thought he was gonna blow us all up he had a gas canister,and
was trying to get into his trunk,i thought we were gonna die,i just ran for
my life" Glasgow:"a swaggered by the motor that wis on fire,and the dafty
couldnae even open his boot,he wis in fire annaw so a ran up n gave him a
good boot to the baws"
America:there was this huge explosion,it sounded like war,i thought i was
gonna die"
Glasgow:"There wis a bang,yi know when yi throw B.O basher intae a fire it
wis like that"
America:"i'm too traumatised even to speak,i thought i was gonna die"
Glasgow "here mate,gies 2 minutes till a phone ma auld dear,if am gonna be
oan the telly a want her tae tape it"
Is that all? (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA:
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.
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Manufacturers are required by law to accept them for disposal...likewise antistatic dust brushes that have a polonium-210 strip. Check the instructions.
rj
So? (Score:2)
"Dirty Bombs" (Score:2)
medical and waste from other countries (Score:5, Insightful)
take a white van, pack it with TNT and strontium-90 [epa.gov] from radiotherapy equipment [cancerhelp.org.uk] or nuclear waste/ nuclear plant parts [epa.gov] and set it off in times square. doesn't have to cause a lot of damage. the real "bomb" is the psychological and economic bomb: no one will want to go to midtown manhattan anymore
after the explosion which would kill a half dozen people and shatter some windows (nothing, right?), you'd have reporters walking around with geiger counters, and talking about the half-life of strontium-90 [wikipedia.org] (28 years). 5.5 years after 9/11, we are still talking about the air quality issue [google.com] of the particles of concrete and steel and diesel fuel and aluminum and asbestos. that's all washed away by now. but radioactive contamination doesn't work that way. it sticks around for decades
in other words, you can kill a bunch of people. ok, they are gone, done for. case closed. people grieve, people move on. psychologically, it's cut and dry. but you can do another kind of bomb, something more sinister and insidious: you can damage a society more by introducing a permanent nagging environmental degradation in the form of low level radiation. this is far more damaging economically and psychologically. it's scandalous, it's a permanent nag in your head, not something you get over. and that's the whole point of terrorism: the instilling of terror. terrorists can't kill us all, but they can influence our thinking. to paraphrase stalin ("a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic"): the endless fretting over a nonquantifiable and continuous degradation to your health for years is perhaps more terrorizing than outright killing someone
that's why a dirty bomb is so nasty a concept, and why we should worry about it
Re:medical and waste from other countries (Score:5, Insightful)
QFT. The insane long lines, the stupid restrictions, etc. involved with air travel these days simply indicate that the terrorists have won. They no longer need to actually attack to distrup the lives of hundreds of thousands, the mere mention of the possibility of an attack or even a new attack vector is enough...
well that's the psychology of fear (Score:2)
until the world is satisfied that the threat from militant islamic fundamentalists is history, this is all you will see in contemporary life. for decades. because militant islamic fundamentalism isn't going away any time soon, no matter what the usa, or israel, or the eu, or any government anywhere does
and can it be any other way? i'm not asking you if it SHOULD be any other way, but i'm asking you if it WILL be any other way considering simple human psychology
yes, your chance of be
Knock knock knock (Score:2)
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Not quite a stop at Walmart (Score:3, Insightful)
the investigators, using commercially available equipment, were able to modify it easily
With that forged document, the auditors approached two industrial equipment companies to arrange to buy dozens of portable moisture density gauges
If some terrorists were really keen on getting their hands on some americium-241 and cesium-137, I reckon they might just choose to try and
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At least, that's how it all happened with 9/11. Surprise strike, hysteria, inquiry, hysteria, "reforms", decay of civil liberties.
Nooooo! (Score:5, Funny)
Nooooo! Poor widdle Americans! Awwww. *Hugs Americans*
B.
stupid (Score:2)
If MR Burns can get for his plat and keep with.... (Score:2)
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It was worse in the UK till the 1980s (Score:2)
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Why was he an "idiot"? He was obviously still alive when you took over, so he didn't end up blowing himself up or poisoning himself.
BTW- Thorium oxide is actually quite boring, and you can buy it commercially since it's used for the flame mantles of gas lanterns.
Personally, I resent Nannie State telling me what good little boys can buy and what they can't...
-b.
Obvious question (Score:2)
(It's a joke.)
(...or is it?!?!)
Americium doesn't kill people... (Score:2)
Another day at NRC (Score:2, Informative)
Is it just me... (Score:2)
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Yes. The standards of "contamination" used by these agencies is extremely strict. The difference between a surface that is "contaminated" and one that actually presents a real health risk to someone is about 3 or 4 orders of magnitude.
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You really need to read the article. The nuclear device in question is a slightly dirty bomb that probably would do way less overall damage than McVey and Nichols accomplished in Oklahoma City. Nichols and McVey used a van full of diesel fuel and fertilizer. You can buy those just about anywhere for less money and with less hassle than you can small amounts of radioactives.
The radioactive materials involved are smal
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What would be a whole lot more interesting is if they got a license to:
(1) Buy those gamma sources used to radiograph submarine hulls. There's some real zap in those.
(2) Buy or deal in medical radiactives, like large Cobalt 60 cancer treatment devices.
(3) Transport radioactive wastes from power plants.
Now with those puppies you could make a considerable mess.
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Nuclear = this story
Biological = sex
Chemical = dust bunnies
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"Longer halflife" isn't all bad. It means that the rate of decay and thus the rate of radiation emission are lower. Something with a 14 bln. yr. halflife is unlikely to be very harmful due to radioactivity, though it may be a chemical poison.
-b.