[ RadSafe ] Government eyes Supertanker for dirty duty

[Brennan, Mike (DOH)]

I've heard talk of this kind of thing before, and I am very skeptical of its value.

1)  Unless you are talking about having a number of these planes loaded and staged around the country, they won't be timely enough.  Let's say it only takes 12 hours from the event until the plane is loaded with the right agent and on scene (a breath-taking short time, in my opinion).  The plume will have covered square miles and already settled.  

2)  One thing you can be completely certain of is that the dispersal pattern of gel from the sky will be completely different than the pattern of smoke from an explosion (or whatever).  This stuff will do nothing at all for any contamination that gets inside of buildings, and isn't likely to be helpful for contamination on the outside of buildings.  

3)  The gel might be useful in some clean-up situations, but I think directed application with a hose would be better than dumping from the sky.  Think precision guided munitions, not carpet bombing.

For dirty bombs, the first thing to do is keep ignorant policy makers from doing stupid things, like requiring wounded people be deconned before they are treated, or ordering evacuations when shelter in place is called for.  As for deconning big chunks of a city; fire hoses and the storm drain system will be more useful than airplanes full of hair gel.

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] On Behalf Of Cary Renquist
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 2:52 PM
To: radsafe at radlab.nl
Subject: [ RadSafe ] Government eyes Supertanker for dirty duty

Interesting Decon tool...



Government eyes Supertanker for dirty duty By John Croft  on August 19, 2009 7:33 PM

Talk about low and slow aerial work..

...Evergreen International Aviation says a number of US government agencies are contemplating the use of its 20,000 gallon aerial Boeing 747-100 "Supertanker" for a variety of fairly nasty clean-up jobs in urban America. 

Included in the potential uses are dropping decontamination foam in the aftermath of a radiological dispersal device, aka "dirty bomb" or biological weapon of mass destruction.

"We're doing some testing on cloud knockdown, sort of a Chernobyl-type event," says Sam White, Evergreen senior VP. The worst power plant disaster in history, the 1986 Chernobyl reactor failure released a large dose of radioactive fallout in a plume that transported as far away as Northern Europe.

Research at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is ongoing to develop foams and gels, which may both knock down the plumes while eliminating the need to resolve the situation the old fashion way - tearing down the buildingings on which the plume falls and starting over again.

According to Technology.com, Darpa has developed a gel composed of the materials used in disposable diapers mixed with nanoscale particles what will coat surfaces after a dirty bomb, pulling out the contaminants. The site says the gel absorbs more than 98% of radioactive atoms in about a half hour on concrete. Crews, heavily garbed, would later mop up the area. 

The Supertanker today is on-call for much less nebulous uses by the State of California -- fighting forest fires. For fires, which the jumbo jet has not yet been called up on to do in the state, the Supertanker carries a mixture of water and foams or gels that when dropped act as a flame retardant that creates a "line" 3/4 of a mile long to help stop a fire's progression.

The State of Alaska recently used the Supertanker to drop two loads of retardant on a fire in the Fairbanks area, as shown in the picture above.




---
Cary Renquist
Direct: +1 661-309-1033
Fax:    +1 818-558-4087
cary.renquist at ezag.com

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