Nuclear Scanning Catches a Radioactive Cat On I-5

Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"

Comments

Ha, ha

[bruce_the_loon]

Now, how do you explain that you've just had radiation treatment to the mindless TSA buffoon who's found you're radioactive?

Re:Ha, ha

[budgenator]

When I had a cardiac stress stress test there was a sign that informed patients that cross the boarder would trigger radiation detectors for at least three days. I work in a dental office and we are the only office that accepts the DHS's dental plan so we have many patients that are Customs Agents, he told me it took the Canadians 3 days to get their trash cleaned up enough to get it across the boarder without triggering the detectors.

So let's say...

[ForestGrump]

1. I'm remodeling my house. I go down to Home Despot/Slowes and buy a dozen smoke detectors. Would I get pulled over for being a suspected terrorist?

2. I'm a cancer patient undergoing radiation therapy. What can be done to prevent the horror of being pulled over by the KGB? Would it be reasonable to issue "radiology patient" tags, like they issue handicapped tags for the handicapped?

3. What is the false positive rate of such monitoring? Here, we have a cute example of a sick cat setting off a false positive. What about other incidents like this that fail to get into the newspaper?

Grump

Let's say, then:

[Wilson_6500]

1) Depends on the design of the detector. There's no chance the alpha particles from the Am-241 will be detected, as the cardboard box the smoke alarms are in will stop those, but the photons might be. The cat's scan residue (rimshot, please, along with everyone else in this discussion--but I would guess it's Tc-99 residue from a Tc-99m scan) was picked up by this detector system, so assumedly the Am-241 gammas might as well. That said, I don't know what activity is usually used smoke detectors (and I'm too lazy to look it up), or what activity is usually administered to cats during vet. nuclear med. procedures; questions like these are ones of quantity. You might well be stopped. From their perspective, you might well be buying twelve Am-241 sources to line the casing of a bomb.

2) I was under the impression that oncologists were in the habit of doing just that--giving "doctor's notes" to patients with outpatient implanted brachytherapy seeds or devices. Being treated with a linear accelerator would not be likely to leave a perceptible amount of radiation in your body (photoneutrons from high energy linacs might cause some activation, but I don't think that it's generally a serious concern as far as setting off radiation alarms). Would it also bother you that you might well set off radiation alarms at nuclear power plants, if you happened to work at one, while being treated for your cancer?

3) From a machine perspective, this was not a false positive. From a judicial/social standpoint, it was. I don't have much more to add beyond that.

Insightful??

[adkeswani]

I check the comments expecting to see a series of Score:5 Funny.

Instead, I find that most comments are Insightful and Informative.

Come on people, a RADIOACTIVE CAT!

Oh well, I guess this may be given an Insightful too...

Re:Proper investigation

[budgenator]

"Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour," Giuliano told the crowd. "Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]."

That is the impressive part, they didn't have to "cut" open the cat because they knew what they were looking for inside a car passing at 70MPH; all they needed to know is how much and in what form. A therapeutic amount in a cat is no problem isn't a problem, half a Kg for a car bomb is a problem. Another interesting point is while he didn't actually say it, it sounds like these things are quite portable and was contained in the vehicle.