Crooks swipe plutonium, cesium from US govt nuke wranglers' car. And yes, it's still missing While staying at a Marriott hotel in San Antonio, Texas, US government staffers left nuclear material, recovered from a non-profit research lab, in a rented SUV overnight. The following morning, these individuals – described as "security experts" at the US Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory – found their Ford …
Not a problem here. My primary field in the military. The remarkable thing would be not following the links. I spend most of my time on Twitter talking to others on this since all the activities by "rogue nations" became a thang. In real life, I'm more worried about the Plutonium, not due to bomb making material, rather as to radical treatment required upon exposure.
Extremely toxic as in radical amputation required.
Extremely toxic as in radical amputation required.
Actually no. Plutonium is a lot less toxic than, say, arsenic or beryllium. There's a lot of scare stories about Pu and of course similar fairy-tales about uranium (see Gulf War Syndrome for a worked example) but generally they're not a real biochemical threat or even a serious radiological worry. There's a "hot particle" theory that's mostly wild imagination crossed with movie-script physics and biology about how a particle of Pu could cause instant lung cancer. Healthy lungs are good at clearing dust and particles out if the airways and such a particle wouldn't stay resident in the lungs for more than a couple of days.
People who worked on the Manhattan Project back in the 1940, doing things in a hurry without modern Elf and Safety rules got Pu in cuts and grazes, inhaled and ingested Pu particles etc. and they were mostly OK decades later.
People who worked on the Manhattan Project back in the 1940, doing things in a hurry without modern Elf and Safety rules got Pu in cuts and grazes, inhaled and ingested Pu particles etc. and they were mostly OK decades later.
The US government has a long history of saying everything is fine concerning health issues (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9314220) and decades later admitting it was slightly less so (https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/29/us/us-acknowledges-radiation-killed-weapons-workers.html). The examples happen to be pertinent to the subject at hand, but are definitely not isolated.
The US government has a long history of saying everything is fine concerning health issues ... and decades later admitting it was slightly less so.
True, in a broad sense. But the US government is a very large and heterogeneous organization, and also one in which individual departments may change relatively quickly. Generalizations about what "the US government ... say[s]" are of rather limited predictive power.
The ATSDR broadly concurs with Mr Sneddon's post, and (unlike everyone in this threat) provides some actual data to back up their conclusions. I'd refer you in particular to section 3 of its toxicological profile for plutonium, which includes this statement:
As discussed in Section 3.5, Mechanisms of Toxicity, plutonium-induced health effects are considered to be the result of energy deposited by alpha particle emissions in tissues that retain plutonium for extended periods (i.e., lung, bone, liver following inhalation exposure). Similar health effects would be expected from any alpha-emitting source that would result in similar cumulative tissue-specific radiation dose and dose rate.
In short: About as toxic as you'd expect from any similar fissile element.
The claims of extreme plutonium toxicity seem to have originated with Ralph Nader, who is not, in fact, a toxicologist, and may occasionally indulge in hyperbole.
"may occasionally indulge in hyperbole"
That pretty much sums up the entire antinuclear hysteria - aided and abetted by Cold Warriors who had no desire to be involved in WW3
It makes a sensible approach to the issue "difficult" - and that's not helped when those with vested interests in the status quo keep tossing mud at vastly less weaponisable fuels/systems
Pu is a toxic heavy metal. It's a weak alpha particle emitter but the real risk is in its chemical properties and you don't want to ingest it
Similar issues apply to uranium. The risks are chemical (just like lead poisoning), not radioactivity
I'd imagine that the tweaker who broke into the car won't appreciate any of this, They're just looking for something to sell and probably dumped the strange shit down a drain somewhere
Sigh. It's not going to be a "dirty bomb". The problem will be much quieter and therefore sinister. Somewhere someone is stupidly 'accidentally' spreading this crap all over some neighbourhood. And no one will know until the damage to people has been done.
This one - Goiânia accident - will give you the idea. Perusing List of civilian radiation accidents will raise the hair on your neck until it starts falling out.
Gotta love "In the summer of 1992, a utility worker for the Taiwanese state-run electric utility Taipower brought a Geiger counter to his apartment to learn more about the device, and discovered that his apartment was contaminated." Or "The incident was discovered months later when a truck delivering contaminated building materials to the Los Alamos National Laboratory drove through a radiation monitoring station."
again ignorance is bliss.,
Lets start with plutonium - presumably 239.
The queens handled a couple of kg in 1957 on a trip to Harwell 'oh its warn; she said
She isn't dead,.
Plutonium is barely radioactive at all. Its far more a heavy metal poison than it is a radiological biohazard.
The few grams of Caesium 137 MIGHT be a tad dangerous if someone swallowed the lot.
But in a dirty bomb?
Forget it. You probably were exposed to far more as a result of nuclear test fallout back in the day
That's kind of hilarious how blase they were about radioactivity back in the day. Even though the dangers are way overhyped (as the queen surviving just fine for 61 years since that demonstrates) I imagine if William and Kate wanted to pick up a hunk of plutonium to see if it was warm their security would quickly disabuse them of that idea.
The big problem with plutonium is inhaling it, if it would be made airborne and spread out. It'll stay in your tissues and cause problems - sort of like if instead of just picking up a hunk of it the queen was given a necklace made of it. I doubt she would have been cancer-free having plutonium against her neck since 1957.
I doubt she would have been cancer-free having plutonium against her neck since 1957.
When I was six or seven, I was bought my first wristwatch - a Timex if I remember correctly - which had each hour marker, and all three hands (hour, minute and second) painted in Radium paint to glow in the dark.
A few years later, in a school physics lab, we were introduced to a Geiger counter, which registered my watch quite strongly!
I had been wearing all that radioactive goodness every day for a number of years, as I'm sure many other people of my generation will have done.
"The few grams of Caesium 137 MIGHT be a tad dangerous if someone swallowed the lot."
It's a pretty nasty gamma emitter and the part of used nuclear fuel rods which makes them dangerous to approach for the first few decades (actually the gamma emissions of the barium is breaks down into). If unshielded, whoever handles it will be quite ill in a short period of time (as will someone exposed within a few metres for a longer period)
Fun factoid: "Alien Cattle Mutilations" were the result of paniced nuclear scientists chasing fallout clouds from Nevada bombs when they blew in unexpected directions. They wanted to assess iodine and cesium uptake and didn't think to take the obvious course of buying offal from local slaughterhouses
... or the Bentonite in your cats litter tray, or the Braziil nuts in the bowl of nuts, or the Bananas ripening on the side, or the fact that you live down wind of a coal fired power station (Radon dontchakno') etc etc....
slight radioactivty in my kitchen due to the granite countertop
Yup - granite is a known source of radiation due to the low levels of Potassium-40, thorium and (in some granites) low levels of uranium.
My wife's parents both died of cancer - her father was a stonemason who worked with granite for most of his life and her mother was exposed to granite a lot for most of her life. I'm hoping that my wife's years away from it will reduce her chances of cancer..
In my case, fusion work, but we need to calibrate our detectors too. It's really hard to get hands on a cal source over about 1/4 micro-curie... (yes, that's .25 millionth...of an equivalent gram of Ra).
If what they were talking about here were actual cal sources, while you wouldn't want to swallow one there's no real danger involved...(if you swallow one, you might choke, after all...)
If you want radiation exposure, fly in a commercial airliner...
This is actually pretty good and very nicely done: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Now, collecting uranium ore - including that from the natural reactor in Africa which has all sorts of nasty fission products still going in it - is totally legal, and the stuff can be bought by the pound. And isn't hard to extract the fun stuff from, just illegal.
Grams in a test source? Micro grams, maybe. Speculation isn't fact or in this case, likely to be correct at all. Maybe counting the epoxy encapsulation and the box it came in?
So I rate this "scare mongering" on the level that they had to rename "nuclear resonance imaging" to Magnetic resonance imaging" because as soon as people hear nuclear, what sense they had flies out the window. Even though it's nuclei that are resonating like spinning tops in the magnetic field, the equipment is the same no matter the name.
Nice explanation, have an upvote.
The article mentions "dirty bomb" Although I cant see there being enough to drop in the town square and give the populous cancer, is there enough to say grind into granules and put in a letter and post to some politician you dont like and get them sick?
Yes. Yes, it is scaremongering. If those calibration sources contained as much material as most of the commentariat (including me) seems to be expecting, then even mentioning dirty bombs is the equivalent of evacuating a building for fear of the devastating explosive device someone might build using a single match stick that went missing.
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I think a more measured headline would have been:
"Pissing tiny speck of radioactive material goes missing, government to spend $275 on replacement"
I have no idea of the cost of the plutonium one but if your in the US and want a 10µC Cesium¹³⁷ standard United Nuclear have got you covered for $145 + $130 if you want better calibration:
http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_5&products_id=819
Im seriously tempted by their Spinthariscopes though, but i have no idea if I can get one shipped to the UK:
http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2_12
Im seriously tempted by their Spinthariscopes though, but i have no idea if I can get one shipped to the UK:
Now that I've read it's "a device for observing individual nuclear disintegrations", iWant! I could add it to my pile of 'What's that?' and 'and what's that?' gizmos. Or get a pair and mount them in steampunkesque goggle frames ready for if/when the Strontium Dog movie comes out. Be prepared for the Apocalypse! Or more likely migraines induced by the sparkling. And also curious what else was in the Chemcraft nuclear chemistry set that would be banned today..
> ...seriously tempted by their Spinthariscopes...
You should be able to build such a thing yourself: all it really is, is a zinc sulfide covered glass plate (you need glow in the dark paint and some transparent plate), and some piece of radioactive material (ask you local mineral collector).
I once had a chunk of Pechblende (from "Katanga, Kongo", whatever that is in English). Add a small piece of glass with some zincsulfide (and a loupe)... fun, fun, fun!
About radioactive minerals: use something solid like Thorium ore (e.g., Monazite). Do avoid stuff that is dusty like those lovely green Uranium minerals. You could inhale particles from it and you DON'T want that.
If you think this is scare mongering, then I regret being restrained, and not going balls out
In the opposite direction of scaremongering, some useful context might've been provided with a sentence to the effect of, "Typical plutonium check sources have X curies of radiation, which compares to a dangerous dose of Y curies."
Most news articles on radioactivity threats - like the recent radioactive sinkhole in Florida - neglect context like that and people get alarmed over something less radioactive than a banana.
And isn't hard to extract the fun stuff from, just illegal.
Not even illegal, just chemical engineering. I read a report a few years back about an American undergrad who, for extra credit in his Chem Eng course got some low-grade uranium ore from a desert location by hunting for it with a Geiger counter. He refined it into yellowcake, the minehead product of uranium producers and got the extra course credits for the effort. He gave a couple of grams of the stuff in a glass phial to a student friend (not a Chem Eng undergrad). His friend's college dorm found out about this incredibly dangerous material, called in the NRC and law enforcement and kicked him out.
Being the 21st Century, there's a video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl3NamzoFrM
Cody's Lab. Creator of interesting and educational vehicles, and probably entries on various watch lists. Not something I'd be tempted to try at home, or anyone else's home. Just sayin..
I was told never to leave a work laptop in the car
Many years ago at an interview for a field service job, I was told to leave stuff in the car and not to leave it in the house. The reason being is that if the stuff is in the house and not the car and something happened to it, it wasn't covered by insurance.
Raging Environmentalists are not particularly impressive.
Oh, I don't know about that. Watching them turn red, start stomping their feet and then shaking and sputtering is pretty good humor.
If I want to bull bait them, I have T-shirt that on the front says: "Save the whales" and on the back "Collect the whole set". It sets off the environmentalists (Green Peacers are the best fun) AND the PITA folks in one fell swoop.
I'm sorry, do you know how toxic and fatal this stuff is if you get even a smidgen of it into your system? You don't leave it in your car in a hotel car park. Possible that the fools that nabbed it will suffer an appropriately grisly end. Otherwise I advise revised security procedures after viewing that fine documentary "Edge of Darkness".
I would think the format is Pu embedded in a ceramic matrix. Kinda like a stone, only more radioactive.
It would not be free metal or anything that you can "get into the system".
Unlike what The Swede did in his kitchen.
Plutonium is a low-level radiation hazard. Most isotopes emit alpha particles during their decay process; alpha particles can be stopped by a single sheet of paper. One isotope (241, I think, but I can't be arsed to look it up) emits beta particles. Betas can be stopped by a single sheet of plywood. Furthermore, as plutonium's half-life, again depending on isotope, is measured in hundreds of thousands to millions of years, it takes a Very Long Time to emit anything much. Plutonium is considerably more dangerous as a heavy metal than as a radiation source. If you ingest sufficient plutonium you will be dead of heavy metal poisoning within hours to days, though you'll need to have eaten a _lot_ of the stuff to die quickly. Note: if you get plutonium heavy metal poisoning, you won't think that you're dying quickly. Nope.
In order for it to go boom, you need a critical mass, something more than five kilos worth. (No, I'm not going to say how much more. Find out yourself.) Usually you get to the critical mass by slapping several subcritical masses together really hard and really fast; this requires explosives, and careful timing. If you want to make a big boom, and are short of really good explosives and all the special timer-thingies needed for a plutonium boom, use uranium. Classically you only need two subcritical masses with uranium, rather than the dozen or more with plutonium. It's much easier to make. One of the boys on the Manhattan Project (I can't be arsed to look him up, either, I saw the quote in Richard Rhode's _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_) once quipped that any schoolboy could make a uranium bomb, but it takes real talent to make a plutonium bomb.
A radiation source of the type mentioned would weigh grams, and would contain milligrams of plutonium at most. It's major dangers would be as a choking hazard, and might be interesting to pass out the other end. I picked up more radiation the last time I was in the New York subway system than I would from swallowing one of those things.
You neglected to add, alphas short distance but huge impact in biological system, hence nasty in your body as a lot more chance of doing something unpleasant on the mutation front.. so can be a problem if ingested but not flushed out ("external" alpha no problem as dead outer skin layer deals with them, issues are "internal"
@WolfFan:
"Usually you get to the critical mass [with Pu] by slapping several subcritical masses together really hard and really fast; this requires explosives, and careful timing."
I used to think that, but then I read that the original method was to make a hollow sphere of Pu and use a very carefully engineered explosive lens around it to compress the sphere in order to increase the density enough that the applied neutron flux is enough to initiate a chain reaction: basically, increase the ratio of "nucleus neutron capture volume" to "total Pu material volume" enough. The Pu sphere's hollow so that you can put the required neutron source in the centre of it.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's what's still done. Designing the explosive lens is tricky. So is getting it all to detonate adequately simultaneously.
Exactly how one applies the required neutron flux is, I gather, something which is not widely advertised - this link gives a rough guide as to the original method:
<http://www.unmuseum.org/buildabomb.htm>
I've heard of tritium being used in more recent designs.
Uranium bombs: "It's much easier to make"
Yes, but first you have to purify your uranium. Little Boy used almost 2 billion 1946 dollars worth of material (Ironically dropped using a Norden Bombsight which cost $2billion to develop)
(This is why fears about "uranium enrichment" making bombs are misguided, It's cheaper to BUY your enemy than to have a fleet of such things - DEPLETED uranium is what people should keep an eye on as this is the feedstock for the plutonium weaponsmaking cycle)
Fun factoid #2 for the day: The original uranium power reactors (Nautilus and Shippingport) were built using uranium because thorium wasn't available and the weapons processing facilities had tens of tons of enriched uranium leftover from the bomb production process. From there it just snowballed
I'm sorry, do you know how toxic and fatal this stuff is if you get even a smidgen of it into your system?
The current vogue for apologising for a comment before it's actually written is getting very tiresome.
But appropriate in this case.
Apology accepted. This time.
do you know how toxic and fatal this stuff is if you get even a smidgen of it into your system?
Do you? More specifically, do you have access to some sort of world-wide computer-based collection of information, some of it vaguely trustworthy, that might support or refute this claim?
'cause I do.
About 93 kg of HEU to be precise.
What the crooked operators left for the US was a superfund site quite near a nice suburb / the local hospital: The Apollo Affair.
Inciting terror does not require creating an actual risk. Just say either "radiation" or "dirty bomb" and people get extremely nervous. Have something go boom and spread a small amount of something that will register on survey meters and you can create a major panic, even if there is no actual danger. You don't even have to tickle the survey meters, just tell the hyper-competitive media that smoke bomb you just set off in the public park contains stolen plutonium and watch the breathless coverage incite a major panic. The whole idea behind terrorism is to generate fear, not cause major damage.
... while I was having my breakfast -espresso coffee + pincho de tortilla - at a local bar, a guy dressed in a blue jumpsuit entered the place carrying an orange plastic case. He looked around and left the case in an empty corner of the bar. The barman, who knew him, asked what was in the orange case, and the guy explained it was a radioactive source used for inspecting pipes. He wasn't allowed to leave it alone in his van, so he had to carry it everywhere.
For a few seconds, the only sound in the place was that of chairs inching away from the aforementioned corner. 8^)
That's a terrible pun...... but I like it.
As one of the previous commentards have said, you would probably get more radiation exposure from an old watch than these samples. Everything always get's blown up (sorry about that) by media hype with these things.
Regardless of all this, leaving anything of value (especially radioactive sources perhaps) in a car in a hotel car-park is perhaps a bit foolhardy.
Or even the car itself.
Or, in my case, a motorbike. Picture if you will, two English motorcyclists riding down into France to meet their Dutch friends at Chartres, in preparation for a week of zooming round the South of France on ridiculously fast motorbikes.
The nice man at reception tells our two English heroes that 'their bikes will be fine in the front carpark' so they duly leave them there, albeit locked together (and to a nearby pole) with proper sucurity-grade bike locks and chains.
Our two Dutch friends arrive some hours later and (unbeknownst to us) are told that their bikes shouldn't be left out the front but should go into the rear, locked and secure, carpark. Beers are had and a good evening is had by all.
Imagine our surprise when, in the morning, the two bikes[1] in the front carpark are conspicuous by their absence and the only sign that they were there is some bits of heavyweight security chain which show signs of being professionally cut. Imagine also our surprise when the recenptionist from yesterday isn't in, having gone on holiday somewhat early.
Also imagine our surprise when the French police just give a Gallic shrug. They do, however, give us a crime number that we can use in our insurance claim.
That put an end to that bike holiday as we couldn't hire bikes in France (being English and all, they would only hire bikes to people with French residency and licences) so had to make do with riding round southern England instead. Which made our progress a tad slower as we could lose our licences this side of the Channel..
Still, on the plus side, I got to ride a Honda PanEuropean for a week. Which was nice, even though it had the same rev-range as yer typical tractor. But it could corner ridulously fast for such a big bike..
[1] A fairly new Honda VFR750 - the nicest bike I ever rode. Fast, nimble and comfortable. Replaced with a Honda VFR800 which was none of those things (apart from maybe fast - although the linked brakes made it pretty dangerous in the wet). And a new Suzuki Bindit^W Bandit.
Almost all nukes are portable, the ones dropped from bombers or fired on the top of missiles. There were British nuclear land-mines (meant to be kept at working temperature by chickens) which weren't portable but that's about all.
Man-portable? You're probably thinking of the Atomic Demolitions Munition series of nukes which could be carried by two people, deployed off the back of a small truck to demolish bridges and other structures. The US took them out of service back in the 80s once the Soviet Union fell apart and the threat of a Red Army road race to the Atlantic ports evaporated. There's nothing left in the toy locker that's small either in size or yield, even for tactical use.
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Wow - never saw that one coming. Expensive (or just expensive-looking) cases unattended in a car park over night got stolen?
I can only imagine the disappointment on their faces when they realised it wasn't stuff they could easily sell on... it's probably been dumped somewhere as they couldn't sell it. Either that, or "Here ya go Meemaw, a nice shiny rock for your mantelpiece!"...
Two completely unrelated points.
1. The "security experts" obviously felt happier not sharing their room with the stuff overnight.
2.One of my favourite lines from "Good Omens" - probably wrongly remembered - from the Pestilence Pollution horseman of the apocalypse... Plutonium may last ten thousand years, but Arsenic is for ever ...
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