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Discarded Strontium-90 Found in ex-USSR
andaru writes: "The BBC is running this story about discarded canisters of strontium-90 found in the woods in Georgia, ex-USSR. It goes on to mention the possibility of a "dirty bomb," which would contaminate a large populated area (like cracking one open in the Great Lakes)." Some simple advice: if you find a random container, anywhere, that has melted the surrounding snow, don't mess with it, mmmkay?
Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any other potential uses for that particular material than a "dirty bomb"? Prefferably something CONstructive?
mmm... self-powered pc with a small nuclear reactor at it's core..
If it were dilluted to the volume of lake superior, it wouldn't be harmful anymore.
Repeal the DMCA!
How does this happen? You are out in the woods and find a strange glowing object that is magially melting ice. How do you ever contemplate taking this thing home?
I am beginning to wonder if the "red" in Russia wasn't referring to the communists but to ther rednecks...
:)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I seem to remember something about the U.S. Army being given a portable nuclear generator at one point--I mean, it sounds like a great deal....wheel one out into a theater and you have a portable power supply. Just add a water-driven cooling system and a radiator.
Of course, it took just one near-disaster to elucidate the relative foolhardiness of allowing grunts to operate thermonuclear devices beyond relatively no-brainer artillery shells.
So now only the Navy gets nuclear power plants--the army is stuck with diesel.
I wonder if this Soviet thing was from some sort of portable genny their military used?
Aren't there allegedly hidden caches of suitcase sized nuclear weapons all over the place. They're the scary ones that you don't want being found by the wrong people.
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Oregon
For some people that's a fucking daily reality, Michael. We have it good in the US but for some, it's a fact of life they have to deal with.
For that comment alone I think you should be the first to go when VA cuts more jobs.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that a real "dirty bomb" is actually fantastically easy to make.
Of course, we all know about the Radioactive Boy Scout who had built by the age of 15 a system capable to radiating a town using home-made parts. Now we find caches of radioactive waste popping up or being dumped in the most unlikely of places, and I'm sure that the reports that make it to the news wires are only a fraction of what is really out there.
If a determined group decided that they really wanted to kill a city, they could do it easily and probably in complete secrecy. Just think about the logistics for a second, and you'll be quite shocked. Really it only requires one thing: commitment. Do a few google and Usenet searches for things like home-built x-ray machines, rail-guns, even the correct way to mine Uranium from pitchblende and you'll find pages and pages of information. Even a full-blown nuclear weapon is not impossible to create with the right funding and determination. It is truly a testament to either human nature or really smart detective work on the part of the CIA and friends that we don't already have suitcase nukes taking out our Super Bowl parties every year.
A "dirty bomb" need not even be nuclear, per se. A truck full of chlorine gas bursting open at the top of Nob Hill in the middle of any one of the countless San Francisco conventions would cause horrific deaths by the thousands, and would not be very easy to clean up before sickening tens of thousands. There are an infinite number of very deadly chemicals that could be sprayed randomly around a city (attached to unsuspecting taxi bumpers as they drive randomly about the city, for example) that may not kill millions of people, but would certainly cause a lot of sickness and seriously scare the population.
In Japan a few years ago, soda cans were being poisoned in a strange spree of nonsensical killings. How often to you check and see that "safety" cap on your Jolt was fully attached before opening it? How hard is it to remove those caps without damaging the "safety seal" when you think about it? Not that hard really. It only takes 2-3 deaths and an anonymous email from posioncokeguy@hotmail.com to the news media to start a pandemonium.
Of course, this particular event took place in Georgia the country and not Georgia the state, but that doesn't mean that we should just laugh it off as something those kooky old communists did. I'm sure we have radioactive and chemical poison floating around all over the place, but do we know where that all is? Especially considering all the illegal dumping that corporations have been doing over the years...
I have spent some time watching a lot of those "true crime" shows over the last few months, and one aspect that seems to be constantly ignored is that most of the crimes are not solved though "investigation" but through dumb luck. Often the key to solving the case comes from a criminal calling home or accidentally bumping into the wrong person in a city a thousand miles away. Just look at how the anthrax investigation has petered out. They have basically stopped looking and now are just waiting for the bad guys to slip up and tell their story to a stranger in Pensacola in a drunken lapse in judgment. A really well honed group could easily pull off a incredible terrorist attack even today. With the right amount of encryption and non-localization, and a healthy dose of disinformation, a group could easily pull off a stunt that dwarfs 9/11 with ease. But the we seem to be complacent with the belief that the materials to create mass destruction are safely locked away. Stories like the above tell us that this belief is flawed, and we should really start to question just how safe we really are...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The nuclear material is usually well protected in metal cylinders, which are also quite nice for use as scrap. In one documented case, the scrap ended up in table legs.
It was only discovered after a truck that had contained the tables passed through a detector at a control point after making an unrelated delivery as Los Alamos. There have been similar documented incidents of contamination in Brazil, Thailand and Turkey as well as others.
I'm not bothering to post all the links. There are too many.
See my journal, I write things there
It is nasty stuff, being chemically similar to calcium. It is therefore absorbed by the body and used in bones.
The van had security from heavily armed guards in and near those vans, guards trained and authorized the use lethal force against attackers. They had security from good radio communications.
The deceptive coloring (camouflage, disinformation, etc.) wouldn't stop a serious attacker, but it would stop a casual one. Nobody denies that deceptive coloring can be a powerful tool. Unfortunately in the software world it's usually hard or impossible to do this - a link in a 1x1 pixel sounds hard to find... until you remember that it's in plain sight in the HTML - but a lot of people have a hard time understanding this.
Actual "security through obscurity" is things like the US policy of never revealing where its nukes are located, or how may are located at any particular site where the very nature of the facility guarantees that some nukes will be present. (E.g., an ICBM base.)
In your example, "security through obscurity" would be a semi leaving the facility ever 10 to 15 minutes with a big "US Nukes!" label on the side. But fewer than 1% of the trucks actually have nukes on board....
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I always wondered where the cool name was from.
"the men dragged them back to their camp" ... "the cylinders, which measure about 10cm by 15cm"
They must be very dense (the cylinders that is ... but then again!).
Graham
With a half life of 28 years, this is something we will have to deal with for quite some time. And.. it mostly relates back to the cold war.
So, for those Slashdotters who claim that we don't have to deal with this in the USA. I strongly recommend you take a look at this web page and read it in detail:
The Tooth Fairy Project
-Lots of great information about radioactive elements used by the United States government during the cold war, and what's happening to those unused weapons at this time. Also very informative of how these weapons/elements affect our daily lives. I read this a long time ago, and have had it saved since then. I owe most of my knowledge of radioactive elements and weaponry to this article. I suggest you read it.
This is a fact of life for everyone, especially Russia and the USA. We don't find it in containers capable of melting ice (even through lead casing), but we do find it in our children's teeth, breast milk, and bioaccumulating in our vegetation. I can avoid an ice-melting container in the woods. I can't change what's in my teeth.