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Re: response to Dirty Bomb
In a message dated 5/16/02 9:30:27 PM Mountain Daylight Time, ncohen12@comcast.net writes:
its way from a nuke plant or weapon facility to say Nevada. They have a van
> with drums full of fertilizer mixed into a sludge with diesel. After
> incapacitating the truck, and any armed security traveling with the truck
> (assuming all nuke shipments will have armed escorts), a couple people place
> shaped charges on the nuke waste containers. Others place the drums under the
> trailer the waste is on. The drums are set to go off a fraction of a second
> after the shaped charges. Timing devices with the degree of precision to do
> this are not that hard to come by. As long as the people pulling off the
> attack don't care that they aren't going to make it out of the scene, other
> than in the form of non identifiable component parts, the logistics are
> probable. Let's say the truck was on the way from a nuke plant just up river
> from New York.
>
> Want to run your numbers again?
>
These numbers have been "run." I am NOT going to go into detail on an open list, except to say that there would be no immediate acute health effects from ionizing radiation in such a situation, and the collective population dose, while larger than from scenarios discussed previously, projects, in an urban area, to about 50 latent cancer fatalities (if you use a linear extrapolation) and in a rural area, to about 0.2 LCFs. The urban population was averaged from the 20 largest cities in the U. S. And what does Mr. Wingard think the local city police would be doing while his terroria=ts put all that stuff in place? Standing around watching?
> Also, just from scanning reports around the globe, it seems that more cobalt
> sources are stolen and opened, usually by people out to sell the shielding for
> its scrap metal value. These non terrorist incidents have exposed large
> numbers of people to hazardous levels of radiation, including lethal, with no
> explosive to spread the radiation around.
Numbers, please? Documentation?
>
> Having looked through a lot of shipping manifests, it also seems that there is
> a large amount of radioactive cobalt shipped around the world, in the
> commercial market, making it a target as well. Maybe you should run your
> numbers based on things Americans could relate to. Given X pounds of various
> radioactive substances (run the numbers for all the ones that are accessible
> due to transport, as well as storage), and a credible explosive force (say the
> Timothy McVeigh bombing), what would the result be?
Are you implying that a credible scenario is to take ALL radioactive materials shipped anywhere, gather them in one place, and blow them to smithereens?
>
> That would be a credible way to approach the topic. To put the previous post's
> chosen scenario in perspective, it is like saying that you don't have to worry
> about terrorist using mercury, because if a terrorist blew up a thermometer in
> a shopping mall the resulting exposure would not be significant.
Even if a terrorist blew up a gallon of mercury, the explosion itself would do a great deal more harm than the mercury. A gallon of mercury weighs about 120 lb. That terrorist is going to attract some attention getting it into the mall! I once (about 40 years ago) spilled about a liter of mercury around my lab (don't ask!). I cleaned it up. the health department came and surveyed the cleanup. No respirator, no moonsuit, no subsequent health problems.
> Deny that there are any radiation or chemical releases from the plant. I had
> the opportunity to catch the Trojan nuke plant operators at this red handed.
> They were on a TV show where they took people, including a camera crew on a
> tour of the plant. Pointing at the steam coming out of the cooling tower the
> spokes dude said that is absolutely pure H2O.
What one saw from Trojan's cooling tower was in fact steam. I really doubt anyone said it was "absolutely pure" because the water going through a cooling tower is not "absolutely pure" to begin with. Besides, emissions from Trojan when it was operating were available to anyone who wanted to know in the University of Washington library. This whole little story sounds embellished, if not fabricated.
>
> Deny that radiation in the environment is a problem.
Background? Is that a problem?
This takes two main
> paths. The first is revisionist. A great example is Chernobyl, where the
> minions of nukes claim that it is paranoia that killed people around the plant,
> and that the release and resulting exposure has caused no lasting harm.
This is just an out-and-out lie. The death toll, impact, resulting cancers, etc. from Chernobyl are the subject of a multitude of papers and studies that have appeared since 1986. I have many of them. The author knows this perfectly well.
And so on...
Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.
ruthweiner@aol.com