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Cobalt-60, and Lessons From a Mexican Theft
Lasrick writes "George Moore and Miles Pomper examine the theft of a truck containing Cobalt-60 and find that, while Mexico did the right thing and reported the theft promptly, they were under no obligation to do so according to international rules and the IAEA. This was true even though the stolen material was 3,000 curies, making it a Category 1 source (the most dangerous). Quoting: 'At a distance of 30.5 centimeters (1 foot) from an unshielded source with an activity level of 3,000 curies, the dose to a bystander would be about 37,000 Rem per hour (a measure of radiation exposure). This means that anyone within a foot of the source when it was out of its shield was being exposed to about 10 Rem per second, a level that would typically kill half of a population exposed to it for 30 seconds. ... The number of fatalities will not be nearly as high as it would have been if the source capsule had been left in a public place. Cobalt 60, like other high-risk radiological sources, is more lethal when it is kept intact as a high-strength source than it would be if spread using a radiological dispersal device such as a so-called “dirty bomb.” Nonetheless, had the Mexican source been used in a dispersal device, the economic consequences could have been extremely significant.'"
An account of what happened and what could have happened via Steve Weintz https://medium.com/war-is-boring/26b40dd869fb
Had a terrorist put this under a seat cushion in a bus terminal, they could kill hundreds, perhaps thousands before it would eventually be tracked down.
Damn dirty bombs, sneak attacks are more deadly.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
'61 was a much better year for Cobalt. Cobalt-60 far overrated, and people are paying too much for it on the open market.
Not exactly. A dirty bomb wouldn't kill very many people, not directly, anyways (or at least not in the short term, although it'd raise the cancer rate considerably). What it would do is be one of the best weapons of terror ever used. Radiation freaks people out, because they don't understand it, can't see it, and can't really do anything about it. Terrorism don't have to cause damage to be effective, all they have to do is cause terror. The people/government does the rest.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Yet with a dirty bomb attack the only people likely to benefit are those already in power by gaining more power as a result. As with any weapon of mass destruction the only defence is attack, so once someone attempts to use it against you the only future defence is all out attack. So only useful for false flags, as in the Anthrax attack target at US politicians by, well, US politicians, in order to drive the vote for the Patriot Act or as it is in reality the non-Patriot totalitarian police state Act.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There was no warning pictogram on the layer that the victims interacted with, which was found at the scrapyard that the thieves had sold the dismantled machine to. When the capsule was brought to a hospital, the staff couldn't figure out whether it was dangerous until a visiting nuclear physicist borrowed equipment from a government lab to check.
The only person that 'played with' or smeared it on their skin was a six-year-old girl who died after eating a sandwich some of the grains/powder had fallen onto.
Evidently only the initial scavengers/thieves were uneducated & poor. The guy that found the cesium-137 didn't handle it in a way that suggested a lack of money (sharing it, wanting to have it turned into a ring for his wife, offering rewards for helping extract it, etc.). The city the families lived at the edges of is similar to a standard major North American city and has a similar educational system, so chances are that they were as educated as anyone up here.