Dirty Bomb - Greg's scenario

["Vincent A King/KINGVA/CC01/INEEL/US" <KINGVA@INEL.GOV>]

Greg missed a couple of things in his "reality" based scenario.



(I'm not even going to address how unlikely it is to hijack/incapacitate a

shipment, place and detonate shaped charges, AND successfully punch a hole

in the cask. That stuff works every time for  Rambo or Arnold Swartzenegger

in the movies, but has a pretty low chance of success in the real world.

Some people should stop watching so much TV.)



So what happens if you punch a hole in the cask?  You have a hole in the

cask and most of the radioactive material still inside.   If it is spent

fuel shipment, you have essentially ALL the radioactive material still

inside (ceramic pellets in steel rods, remember?  - these don't "spew" out

the hole very well).  Greg forgets to mention how disrupting the cask

integrity gets a significant amount of material from the inside to the

outside of the container.  I might not want to stand within a few dozen

yards of the hole, but then who is standing around that close while this is

going on?  I would suggest the intended victims are long gone by this time.



I'm not sure why the drums of diesel and fertilizer are included, unless

the goal is dispersing whatever material is released to low concentrations

as quickly as possible.



He also forgot to include what method the terrorists were going to use to

lure their "victims" back into the hazardous area, past the law enforcement

and military reinforcements.



So, no, I don't need to "run the numbers" again.  Perhaps Greg should try

using actual numbers in his scenario instead of the assumption that

radioactive material is (apparently) infinitely lethal at all

concentrations and distances from the source.  This is the fallacy that the

anti-nuke rhetoric always includes, otherwise it doesn't work.



If you notice, real terrorists tend to focus on activities that have a

higher probability of causing harm with lower investment of resources on

their part.  Something to remember while anti-nukes are proclaiming their

"expert" opinions on how to combat terrorism.



Should security for nuclear power plants, radioactive material shipments,

etc. be heightened? Of course it should. Just like security EVERYWHERE

should be heightened.  But security comes at a cost.  It is wrong to

neglect true vulnerabilities by disproportionately spending security

resources in areas where security is already high and vulnerability is low.



If you believe nuclear power plants should be shut down, fine, just say so.

But any anti-nuke that passes off their political agenda as a national

security issue should be ashamed of him/herself.  There are real, innocent

lives at stake.  We need to protect them instead of addressing

hypothetical, movie-fantasy nonsense.



Vincent King











Froom another list, but permisssion was granted to post here. Thought you;d

be

interested in Greg's opinions.

norm



Greg Wingard wrote:



> Dear friends of all things nuke:

>

>...............

> Let's try again with something a little more realistic than a high school

> stunt, which is essentially what the previous post described.

>

> Terrorist hijack, or incapacitate a truckload of high level nuclear waste

on

> 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?

.......................

> Regards,

>

> Greg

>











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