Mexico's Stolen Radiation Truck: It Could Happen In the US 105
Lasrick writes "Tom Bielefeld, a physicist specializing in nuclear security, writes a detailed article that has some surprising revelations about nuclear security in the U.S. (and elsewhere). Although some security measures have been tightened since 9/11, the US does not require transports of category-1 to be protected by armed guards, and individual states don't have to provide lists of 'safe havens' to the transport company (and they often don't). And at hospitals and other buildings that house radioactive materials and devices, 'security conditions remain hair-raising, even when these facilities have been checked by inspectors.'"
At a NY Hospital a few decades ago... (Score:5, Interesting)
radioactive gold kept disappearing. After a while a staff member's wife or fiance turned up and had radiation poisoning to her hand--someone was taking the gold to make a wedding ring, and didn't know it was radioactive.
I'm sure security is a little better than it was then, but small amounts of radioactive material will probably always be gettable.
Re: (Score:2)
radioactive gold kept disappearing. After a while a staff member's wife or fiance turned up and had radiation poisoning to her hand--someone was taking the gold to make a wedding ring, and didn't know it was radioactive.
Source for that? I'd love to read more about this. I didn't find anything through google-fu.
Re: (Score:1)
For me, "gold radioactive wedding ring" gives first link of: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1243&dat=19810127&id=R_pXAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vvYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3348,1959438 [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Yes--that's going to be the same series of incidents.
Re: (Score:2)
Source for that? I'd love to read more about this. I didn't find anything through google-fu.
Hospital staff at the time. I doubt it made any of the papers, but don't know.
Must not have thought the marriage would last... (Score:5, Funny)
According the Wikipedia, the longest-lived radioactive gold isotope is Au-195, with a half life of only 186 days.
Re: (Score:2)
Or Mercury
Re:Must not have thought the marriage would last.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I hope that they were keeping the staff who didn't know about sealed-source radiotherapy away from the patients...
Think back to the kids who graduated in your class in whatever major you had. Remember that half of them were below-average. The same is true in every profession...
NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
No way. Couldn't happen here! Not in a million years. Someone is smoking some really strange shit to think we could just lose some radioactive material here in the US of A.
Oh - wait. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2... [wikipedia.org]
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Informative)
Well, sure, our totally incompetent government workers could lose track of nuclear materials, but if we simply entrust this stuff to private corporations, all our problems will go away.
Oh, wait....
http://stateimpact.npr.org/tex... [npr.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Those apply to government employees as well
It's worth keeping in mind that this isn't true for three reasons. First, the US government has a history of not complying with safety and environmental regulation, particularly in the area of storage of nuclear waste.
Second, the US government has a history of exempting government agencies and politicians from regulation. For example, for many decades, it was legal for congresspeople to trade on insider knowledge.
Then there's sovereign immunity which prevents the US government from being sued for a va
Re: (Score:3)
It depends.
I'll agree with you where management of said private corporations is less than usually psychopathic or where regulatory inspections are frequent and/or the cost of doing it right is not dramatically more than taking shortcuts.
Where there's more money to be made by taking those shortcuts, and management doesn't care about public consequences or thinks the risk of getting caught is low, then government can (not necessarily will, depending) do a better job because there's no profit bottom line to wo
Re:NIMBY Oh Sure... The LAW protects us... (Score:2)
......If something goes wrong the private corporation is a lot more likely to suffer consequences than the government. The local and international regulations put on corporations for source tracking and handling are quite stringent.
....I feel much better now. Government has been totally effective at assuring that corporations suffer consequences. Especially these days, since they pay to elect all of the lawmakers who deny culpability, bail them out, and then are retained as their consultants. America has nothing to worry about. Democracy works just the way we like it.
Re: (Score:2)
All well and good, but the source discussed in the article I linked wasn't stolen, it was just lost because of incompetence.
Re: (Score:2)
Most doctor's offices and dentist's offices aren't well protected either. I don't know where or how to extract the radioactive materials from imaging units, but it's just sitting there every night and most weekends, unguarded.
I did some work for a small medical clinic a while back. They put a lot of work into the shielding of the room, and the lockup cabinet for drugs, but their after-hours security was a standard commercial alarm system and motion sensors. LEO response time there was about 5 to 10 mi
Re: NIMBY (Score:2)
Just get a job at the facility and you don't even trip an alarm for your trouble.
Re: (Score:3)
Your average doctor or dentist won't have a radioactive source (a chunk of a radioactive isotope such as the Co-60 stolen in Mexico), only an X-ray machine.
The source in an X-ray machine is a specialized vacuum tube that is completely inert and harmless unless connected to power supplies and energized. Of absolutely no value for building a "dirty bomb" or whatever...
Re: (Score:2)
Imaging units don't have a radioactive component. The only radioactive isotopes I think you'll normally find in a radiology department will be in nuclear medicine. In these cases it is injected as a drug and in many cases, because of the time limit on the drug's radioactivity, the cost, and supply chain changes, the drug isn't even ordered from the outside supplier until the day of the exam or sometimes till the patient has arrived.
Re: (Score:2)
Those aren't "nuclear materials"; nuclear materials are materials related to atomic weapons.
All they did was lose a piece of "radioactive material". Dangerous, to be sure, but no more so than many industrial chemicals. There is no reason for the government to track radioactive materials.
Referring to radioactive materials as nuclear materials is scare mongering and FUD. Shame on you.
Tell that to the NRC... (Score:2)
They specifically include "byproduct materials" in their definition (along with "source materials" and "special nuclear materials", the weapons grade stuff you refer to), which includes just about every radioisotope with commercial or medical applications...
http://www.nrc.gov/materials.h... [nrc.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
Not that I would put it past the NRC to attempt to redefine the meaning of the word "nuclear", but you're misreading that. It says: "byproduct material" is "nuclear material (other than special nuclear material) that is produced or made radioactive in a nuclear reactor". It doesn't say "radioactive material ... produced".
No matter what NRC pages say, the fact remains, the term "nuclear" does not refer to all radioactive materials:
http://dictionary.reference.co... [reference.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Incidentally, Cobalt-60 is often produced without a nuclear reactor.
Re: (Score:2)
Shocking as cock-ups like that are I don't think we need to worry about terrorists getting hold of nuclear material. It's just not a credible threat, they don't have the expertise to build dirty bombs with it and are not really interested in doing so anyway.
Time and time again we see how dumb terrorists are, going after extremely difficult targets like aircraft and failing, when there are much easier options available to them. It's easy for us to imagine lots of ways that people could harm us, but movie plo
Re: (Score:1)
Time and time again we see how dumb terrorists are, going after extremely difficult targets like aircraft and failing, when there are much easier options available to them. It's easy for us to imagine lots of ways that people could harm us, but movie plot threats are not worth worrying about.
Exactly what makes us here in the US look so retarded in attacking our own rights and freedoms in the interest of snake oil security, and making such a big deal over all this.
Re: (Score:3)
The media does a great job glossing over a fundamental problem with dirty bombs. You have to shield it well enough to get it to it's deployment before it kills you, but it then has to disperse it's contents widely to be even vaguely effective.
The shielding also has to protect the detonator so it still works by the time it's supposed to go off.
As we have seen, a truck full of ANFO is fairly easy to come up with and sends a rather loud message without radiation.
Re: (Score:2)
A dirty bomb isn't about killing people, it's about scaring people. A pipe bomb will blow out a few windows and maybe kill someone who was unlucky enough to be standing next to it when it went off. A pipe bomb mixed with the guts of a hundred smoke detectors won't be
Re: (Score:2)
Assuming it doesn't get the terrorists caught first from the rediation signature, and it doesn't kill them before they can place the device, it will take a hell of a lot more than a pipe bomb to burst the Shielding and scatter the Americium. Of course, each smoke detector contains only a quarter microgram, so it's going to take a great many to even have a detectable effect.
IOt would have even less effect if not for the Chicken Littles in D.C.
Re: (Score:1)
movie plot threats are not worth worrying about.
As opposed to, "movie theater threats" like Batmans and ex-cops. Who needs terrorists when USA is already well-supplied with local wackos?
FEAR! (Score:4, Funny)
Control the populous with fear! Let's figure out a way to make them even more afraid of nuclear power so we can continue selling snakeoil solutions like solar and wind energy products.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:FEAR! (Score:5, Informative)
There is periodic fretting about security at nuclear generating facilities; but those are relatively scarce, relatively centralized, and, while they do deal in pretty large amounts of radioactive material compared to most other users, need stuff shipped hither and yon only infrequently.
The industrial, scientific, and medical emitters are comparatively puny; but there are lots and lots of them, scattered all over the place, and relatively frequently shipped around.
Essentially unrelated applications with only minimal overlap in risk.
Re: (Score:2)
Control the populous with fear! Let's figure out a way to make them even more afraid of nuclear power so we can continue selling snakeoil solutions like solar and wind energy products.
The "populous" (ObGrammarNazi: it's "populace" in this case), as represented by the thieves of those radiation sources, has already demonstrated how informed and afraid it is: not much. How you can equate medical/industrial isotope capsules with nuclear power generation is another question. (Hint: you really can't, but it's so difficult to pass an opportunity for trolling, right?)
Re: (Score:3)
But the people who want to frighten the general public away from nuclear power just need to get "unsafe" and "nuclear" together in the same headline.
Your average layman isn't going to make the distinction between nuclear power plants and radioisotopes used in medicine when he sees that "unsafe" and "nuclear" tog
Re: (Score:1)
Interesting, but I believe too specialized. Fear is sold to the public so that protection can be offered later. This is normal Hegelian dialectic which has been used here to make people fear pretty much everything. A few months ago a SC politician claimed that SC could be the target of a dirty nuke, Bush gave the same rhetoric about Iraq.
In other words, it's just "fear" being pushed and not "fear of nuclear power" or "fear of this thing" or "fear of those people". Just "fear" so that the growing police
Re: (Score:1)
Actually "medical" and "nuclear" in the same headline seems to be much more frightening to me, add "Obamacare", and it becomes terrifying. Besides, uranium, radon, the daughters of radon must me completely safe for human consumption, "radioactive" can't be such a big deal or they wouldn't have well water naturally carbonated with it in Tahoe.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Inefficient, expensive products that are not going to be subsidized forever...It is not the future.
We cannot live off of solar alone. It is a good companion, but 100% solar is a dream. Nuclear is proven and newer technologies are safe. The energy consortium does not want people using nuclear because it makes them irrelevant with backyard nukes being actively researched and developed today. Let's sell the concept that it's dangerous...that's why we're seeing nuclear 'fallout' in California from Fukushima
Re: (Score:1)
We cannot live off of solar alone. It is a good companion, but 100% solar is a dream
You're not very good at math, are you? For your reference just the amount of solar energy absorbed by the earth in an hour [wikipedia.org] dwarves the amount of energy used by the human race in an entire year by four whole orders of magnitude. We could *never* produce this much energy here on Earth ourselves with any concievable current or future nuclear technology advances. So, just to be clear, additionally (please forgive me for also assuming you're not very knowledgable about physics either) the Sun is in fact also,
Re: (Score:2)
It is merely a side-effect of these aforementioned industries having been so profitable thus far that solar currently looks like a cheap toy.
YES!
New Headline (Score:2)
The TSA is ON IT! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry. The TSA has this all under control. They are now requiring the drivers of these transports to take their shoes off when they get into the cab. So, problem solved!
Re: (Score:1)
They will also ensure the drivers only carry 100 ml of fluids. The won't get far on 100 ml of gas.
Radioactive paranoia (Score:2, Informative)
Sheese. The Threat of the Month club. Every hospital in the world has mildly radioactive material. Even bananas are slightly radioactive. Even worse, many homes contain highly explosive natural gas. Even more worser, we are all being poisoned by bread containing gluten. Get a grip.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Well, its also fattening to the point that eating the "3-2-4-4 way" puts many people at high risk for type-2 diabetes, so your mileage may vary on the "not evil" part.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, that IS quite a trick. Too bad its also the cheapest edible material on the planet and coincidentally highly addictive...
Re: (Score:2)
The cited incident wasn't theft of "mildly radioactive material". It involved a Cobalt-60 shielded radiation source used for cancer therapy. Exposure to the unshielded source for hours or a few days could result in radiation sickness and death.
Re: (Score:1)
Did the guys who stole the truck and opened the container ever turn up in a hospital?
Re: (Score:3)
According to this [nytimes.com], they were arrested and taken to a hospital with one individual showing signs of possible rad. poisoning.
Re: (Score:2)
And while not every hospital does cancer treatment, a lot of them do, certainly all the bigger ones unless they specialise in something else.
Huh (Score:2)
With the billions poured into "security" I'm left with the assumption that this is done on purpose, how else do you explain such a glaring error:?
Re: (Score:2)
With the billions poured into "security"...
Security is for the little people. Corporations, small, medium, and large? Not so much.
Re: (Score:2)
Your comment makes no sense.
Oh, AC... you poor thing. I understand your confusion: Words don't make sense without context.
If you are a "little person" then you might think all this talk about "national security" is about protecting you and your interests, ensuring your safety. That's wrong. Only you are responsible for protecting yourself. Congress has ruled the police have no obligation to protect you, they are enforcers of the law against those who break it (if they're "little people").
If you are a corporation then "security" me
Re: (Score:2)
Small, not so much. It's the large internationals that get a pass. Medium may get some slack mostly from local government.
Re: (Score:2)
how else do you explain such a glaring error:?
Just another symptom of the 'MBA Disease', where people too stupid or lazy to do any real work make decisions on public safety based on how it will effect the stock price and their next quarterly bonus.
Re: (Score:2)
why shouldn't they use the word, for centuries "booty" has meant things taken by violence or robbery. It comes from the middle low german bute, meaning the sharing of spoils. The slang word for either buttocks or vagina originated with the blacks in the late 1920s, and largely stayed in black culture until very recently.
Re: (Score:2)
It was also taken up in the 1970's by that middle-eastern guy Sheik Yerbouti [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
late 70s were "recently", young 'un
Re: (Score:2)
The fact that I even know who Frank Zappa is shows I'm no young 'un :-)
I was in my mid-teens in '79.
But, school dinners in NJ? (Score:2)
Now that is a real priority for government.
Re: (Score:2)
I've witnessed that first hand on two occasions where colleagues had to undergo procedures using radioactive substances. One was a lymphoma scan of some sort and the other a gallbladder scan using 99mTc [wikipedia.org]. Both made my Geiger counter scream. The gallbladder guy was 2000x background for a few hours until it was 'eliminated' and/or decayed.
And armed guards would help ... how? (Score:2)
What is to guarantee that having an armed guard is going to protect the load in transit? A bottom-dollar gun-toting guard given a choice between getting shot for his minimum-wage job and saying "take it" ... isn't going to take a bullet.
That's if he (or she) isn't in the pisser when the truck is stolen.
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
About 100 lb?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
A Mexican is an immigrant, or a migrant, and likely an illegal alien. An American citizen was either born here, with a US birth certificate, or a naturalized citizen. The difference is a legal status.
Re: (Score:2)
Mexicans lives in or come from Mexico. Being a Mexican does not mean that person is an immigrant.
Most Americans come from who knows where so we call these people (x-th generation) immigrants.
This fact is underlined by their blood line: 1/4 Italian, 1/3 Russian and so on.
Re: (Score:2)
You seem to get it, somewhat. A Mexican is a Mexican, and if he's in the US, he is either here with legal papers, or he is an illegal alien. An American citizen is here by right. It doesn't matter if that citizen has a Mexican heritage, or Russian, or Ethiopian, or French, or Vietnamese. He is an AMERICAN, either by birth, or by naturalization. A Mexican is a citizen of Mexico. Get legal, or go home - that is my stance.
Re: (Score:1)
There are more Mexicans living there than there are Americans. ... Trying to make a distinction between the two is quite pointless.
So what's the difference between a Mexican and an American?
A mexican is an american.
But when you just say "american", the person could be from anywhere in america, from canada to argentina.
So you can't really compare those terms.
Re: (Score:2)
sharpies.
totally misused and abused sharpie markers.
Re: (Score:2)
About $10 an hour . . .
A lot of businesses, especially meat processing plants, prefer to hire illegal immigrants from Mexico because if they're injured on the job rather than deal with OSHA and worker's comp they can just fire them and have La Migra ship them back to Mexico at taxpayer expense.