Posted on 02/01/2002 10:50:47 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Edited on 04/14/2004 10:04:59 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
An international team of experts has flown to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to try to recover two highly radioactive objects that were found near a mountainous region controlled by Muslim rebels, officials said Thursday.
The objects, cylinders not much larger than a can of string beans, caught the attention of three woodsmen because the snow nearby was melting. The men lugged the surprisingly heavy objects to their campsite for warmth and soon became dizzy and nauseated. A week later, they had radiation burns. All three men are now in a hospital in Tbilisi, Georgia, and one is fighting for his life.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
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The good news is that the place is so remote, so difficult to reach, even for us. So I believe it is not so easy to reach for terrorists.Like Tora Bora?
Ok so this stuff was steaming under the blanket of snow. What's wrong with this picture.
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If terrorists try to take the radioactive cylinders, he added, "they will probably kill themselves." After the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. and international officials have developed new jitters about the remaining nuclear batteries and are taking aggressive steps to round them up.
"It's a bigger deal, post 9/11," said a Bush administration official. "We're trying not to do this in an alarmist way. We're taking reasonable steps to help the Georgians deal with these and other sources so they are appropriately controlled."
The fear is that the old batteries could be turned into radiation or radiological weapons, sometimes known as "dirty nukes."
I posted it on the Islamic_Violence list because this is a concern in that the Al-Queda would get access to such devices!
This should be: "Dispose of properly." Except FR don't do Unicode, I guess.
Pardon my French ---- but DAMN that's a lot of radioactivity. (And I work with the stuff for a living.... radiation (outside of a nuclear bomb itself) radioactivity is extremely energetic at the nucleus level of the atom .... but almost neglible at the physical (real world)level. If these things were killing people after only a few hours exposure, and were melting snow ..... they were extremely dangerous.
So the REAL question becomes: What were they built for? How did they get "lost" from original accounting? (This would be like NASA or the CIA/NSA "losing" one of their spare telescopes for the Hubble satellite.
WHY was it laying there to be picked up in the middle of nowhere? Who left it laying there? Where did they come from?
Most important: WHAT GOT THE SOURCES THERE in the first place? (Who else died carrying them?)
Are "nuclear batteries" for real?
In real simple language. How would one work?
I wonder why the heck anyone would dump something like this anywhere people could find it.
An isotope like Co60 puts out heat, I think it is 17 watts per gram. You put the isotope in a superinsulating blanket and use the heat to make electricity, perhaps with a peltier stack. Cobalt and Strontium were common but without lots of shielding would be pretty hot- a gram of cobalt 60 is 1,000 curies, or about 10 to the thirteenth disintegratins per second.
When less shielding was called for, the RTGs may use plutonium 238 (not the Pu239 used in fission bombs) because it is an alpha emitter and does not generate lots of gamma which is hard to shield.
A few years ago the Christic Institute got all upset because NASA was going to launch a bird with lots of Pu238 as an electrical power source, and the fear was that if it fell to earth it would, of course, kill us all. Apollo used one too, see the link.
If someone stole a cobalt or strontium or iridium RTG, and removed the isotope package from its heavy shielding, it may emit on the order of several hundered rems per hour, enough to kill in a few hours. It would be quite warm.
As a terrorist weapon, not so potent except for the fear.
A plutonium RTG like the one used on Cassini, with 11 kg of fuel, could not explode itself but if ground up? It would a great mess make.
Yawn!
Not cheap, not easy to make, steal, or transport ..... (Which is probably why the original thief removed the shielding: made it lighter to move by horseback or carry across the mountains by backpack.)
And not usually found in a snowbank high in the mountains.
But an alpha-emitter won't emit enough gamma or beta (neither of which would penetrate even a sheet of paper!) to kill the bearer within hours.
ONLY massive amounts of gamma rays could kill like that, no matter how much shielding was removed from the outside of the can-sized package.
The Soviets HAD small SNAP-like generators that powered their ocean-covering RORSAT radar satellites.....but those were much, much more powereful than a US SNAP generator. Had to be .... since they were trying to bounce radar signals of ships back from the ocean to the satellite in orbit, and then relay the signal back to Moscow.
But that much gamma?
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