[DBrow]

The article is written like the car had large quantities of Pu and Be. It does not say what the Pu isotope was. It vaguely hints that the Pu and Be were together.

Most likely, the car had a device with a small neutron source, like a nuclear gage of some sort. Some lead detectors have sources in them.

They may have been sent back because they didn’t have the paperwork exactly right. The border folks would have no authority to seize a commercial source.

When you want neutrons, you mix Pu and Be (most likely Pu238, used as an alpha source, it cannot be used in a nuke) and neutrons come out. Nicknamed PuBe sources.

PuBe sources are not too dangerous, but if you had a sensitive nuke detector at a border, you’d pick up the neutrons coming from it. The common ones are safer than a source used for weld radiography, for instance.

Journalists should learn a little science; on the other hand it’s hard to scare people with hysterical articles if you look stuff up first. Just putting the word plutonium up gets a reaction from folks.

[Calvin Locke]

Interesting. Myself, I'd use the Pu238 for RTGs, and the Be for mirrorizing a slab of shaped glass for a new telescope.

Alas, no glass worth wasting the Be on, and only a small 1-1/2" peltier floating around in some box.

[RoadGumby]

That rings true. PuBe sources are used because together, those two can produce neutrons. Often they were used as Start-Up Sources for brand new reactor cores.

The article does not say how much, what isotopes or if they were stored together or not. Lots of missing info here.