Posted on 07/16/2018 1:21:39 PM PDT by Red Badger
Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.
Their task was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.
To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to calibrate them: specifically, a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could potentially be used in a so-called “dirty” radioactive bomb.
But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Highway 410, in a high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed and the special valises holding these sensors and nuclear materials had vanished.
More than a year later, state and federal officials don’t know where the plutonium — one of the most valuable and dangerous substances on earth — is. Nor has the cesium been recovered.
(Excerpt) Read more at idahostatesman.com ...
Mable! Your son has made the cat glow again!
Misleading and inflammatory language. The missing items are check sources used to verify correct operation of the radiation detection instruments. The quantities are so small that they are considered exempt, i.e they can be transported and handled without NRC paperwork. Nobody is going to build a bomb, dirty or otherwise from these check sources. Nor is there any hazard associated from proximity to these sources.
Was one of them J. Frank Parnell?
“I asked them not to look in my trunk..”
If the samples/equipment stolen cost anything at all, they should have been secured. I travel by car a lot. I make it a point to never leave anything out in plain view to get stolen, even if I am just going into a store or restaurant for a few minutes. Guess what? I don’t have anything stolen. This just goes to show that you can always count on gubmint”experts” to screw up pretty much anything they do.
And a bunch of used pinball machine parts left back at the mall.
Reminds me of the nuclear boy scout who tried to build a breeder reactor in a shed from materials in smoke detectors.
Doc Brown has it.
LMAO.
Yes the sources and instruments are valuable. probably in the tens of thousands of dollars. Yes leaving them on the back seat was irresponsible. However the purple prose of the article implies that the sources are on the way to ISIS to be fabricated into bombs, just not true.
Two “Government” security experts... That is even more laugh worthy.
I believe you are thinking of Uranium (depleted) which was once a common pigment in paint and ceramics.
Plutonium has never been used in any commercial product that I know of. I can’t imagine it ever being used in commercial products simply because it does not exist in nature and it is very expensive to produce.
Thorium also was used in ceramics and is no longer permitted to be used in most products. Still in lantern mantles I believe.
Government is unaccountable which breeds incompetence.
I get that. I am mindful that if a private in the Army did the same exact thing, he or she would probably be looking at a bust and losing a month’s pay. The “experts” involved here most likely won’t have anything happen to them. It has been my observation that in most cases, the Army expects more responsibility out of privates than the rest of the gubmint expects out of their venerated “experts”. That needs to stop. People like these “experts” need to be fired for being stupid and lazy. Perhaps if they were held accountable and it was made public, stuff like this would not happen as regularly as it does now.
The perps should be easy to track now.
I remember Plutonium being used in magnetic tape erasers about 1970 or so, and it been used in pacemakers:
https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/Miscellaneous/pacemaker.htm
Yeah!
“:^)
I agree. I was a radiological control technician for a while. If I did something that stupid I’d likely be out of job.
... well, he had it first.
Smiling.
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