Slashdot Mirror
What's Being Done About Nuclear Security
KrisCowboy writes "Wired.com has an interesting article about Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's speech about the defensive measures being taken at the Nuclear Energy warehouses. 'Atomic storehouses, vulnerable to terrorist attack, will be emptied of their radioactive loads,' he promises. Keeping in mind the recent Slashdot story about a
Hafnium bomb, more security measures are needed, and fast."
No matter how much you do, some fraction of your vital infrastructure will always be vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful and well-organised attack. If you protected every critical piece of infrastructure in a country -- all the power stations, water supplies, transport routes, government hubs, etc. -- then you'd expend far more resources than are practical on security, and having so many people in the system would cause weak links anyway.
Ultimately, you can't prevent an unknown enemy from committing an unknown act forever. All you can do is your best to stop it (and that's better done starting from intelligence rather than raw defensive power at every vulnerable point) and your best to clean up the mess (e.g., by having back-up generators in key places like hospitals in case the power does go out).
A more serious question that I'd pose, given the above harsh-but-true assessment, is how much could quality of life in general be improved if all the resources being diverted in the name of "fighting terrorism" were invested in hospitals, schools, etc. in the first place.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Hell, the most-likely nuclear terrorism scenario in my estimation is someone purchasing a radiation-therapy machine and randomly zapping people with lethal doses from inside a truck-mounted setup. Given a cool million to purchase some used medical equipment, you don't even need to try to steal nuclear material from federal facilities.
It's worse that you think. A number of years ago (maybe 10 to 20?), the radiation detectors at Los Alamos went off when a delivery of patio furniture passed by. Turns out the cast iron in the furniture contained Cobalt-60. Tracing the shipment back, they found that the furniture had been made in Mexico from scrap metal. Someone in Mexico had sold a radiation therapy machine as scrap.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
My family and I were on vacation in the north-eastern United States a couple of years back. My dad wanted to check out the Three Mile Island vistor center, as he's a bionuclear physicist and is really geeked up over that kind of a thing. We had one of those Hertz rental cars with the GPS helper, so we checked and the visitor center was on there, so we told it to take us there. We pulled in where it told us to, into a street that wasn't much bigger than a driveway. Within a matter of moments we were boxed in by a few Humvees (not the street-legal models, the big should-have-treads things), and have guns pointed at us from all around. We're told very persistantly to slowly get out of the car and put our hands on the hood. We did so, they took our pictures, ran our fingerprints, called in two trucks full of troops to help the obviously overpowered platoon that was trying to keep a family of four under tight watch. Safeties were off, we were potential enemies. After an hour or so (and a search of us and the car) they let us go, told us to never came back, but were nice enough to point us in the direction of the -real- visitor's center. It was closed for the day -_-.