Posted on 06/17/2002 5:03:44 AM PDT by dennisw
Radiological attack: 'Manhattan would be uninhabitable for years'
By Geoffrey Lean
16 June 2002
If a "dirty bomb" were to be set off in New York, every building in Manhattan and for miles around might have to be demolished, concludes one of the United States' most distinguished scientific bodies.
The Federation of American Scientists, which cites 52 Nobel prizewinners among its sponsors, says a bomb made using just one piece of radioactive cobalt could make the city uninhabitable for decades, and seriously contaminate one thousand square kilometres of the states of New Jersey, Connecticut and New York.
Three months ago – long before last week's debacle was even a glimmer in Attorney General John Ashcroft's eye – the federation's president, Dr Henry Kelly, warned the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that the "threat of a malicious radiological attack in the US" was "credible".
He presented the results of a study – carried out by the federation and Princeton University – into what might happen if a bomb containing just a single "pencil" of intensely radioactive cobalt-60 was exploded at the southern tip of Manhattan on a calm day with a slight south-westerly breeze. Plants used to disinfect food by irradiation often contain hundreds of these "pencils", each just a foot long and an inch in diameter.
The danger, as the report makes clear, is not that the bomb would immediately kill people, although deaths would probably result from the force of the explosion. The real threat would come from long-term radioactive contamination, causing hundreds of thousands of fatalities from cancer over decades.
The investigation concluded that Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Times Square, and the swathe of New York stretching up to Central Park that contains most of its skyscrapers would become as contaminated as the no-go area permanently established around Chernobyl. One in 10 people who continued to live in a 300-block area downwind from the bomb would develop cancer. And a huge area stretching 70 miles downwind would be so badly affected that, under US government rules, it would have to be evacuated and the buildings decontaminated or destroyed. In practice, the study says, "demolition may be the only practical solution".
Could it happen? There would probably, as the federation points out, be little difficulty in finding radioactive material. Food-irradiation facilities are poorly guarded – and the world is awash with similar, or even more dangerous, radioactive sources used in industry, medicine and university laboratories. Some two million sites in the US alone are licensed to use radioactive materials, and the government admits that 1,500 sources have gone missing over the past five years. And last year President Bush cut the budget for protecting nuclear waste – and weapons – by 93 per cent.
It would be much harder, says the nuclear consultant John Large, to explode the bomb so that radiation was widely dispersed. The radioactive material would have to be heavily shielded if any terrorist trying to make or use the bomb were not to die within minutes; an X-ray machine typically contains a radioactive source the size of a cod liver oil pill inside shielding as big as a coffee jar.
A successful bomb would have to be designed with great sophistication, first to break open the "coffee jar", then to gradually heat the radioactive source so that it vaporised, and finally to scatter it to the winds.
Also from the Americas section.
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The newspaper, the shopkeeper and the April Fool that went horribly wrong
Andersen guilty in Enron trial
Exit the Dapper Don ? in a sharp suit, naturally
The Federation of American Scientists, which cites 52 Nobel prizewinners...
Yasser Arafat has a Nobel prize.
The FAS is a leftist huddle of worst-case-scenario spewers. The scenario described in the article reminds me of the projections last fall on the numbers of dead from "a single gram of weapons grade anthrax". Technically possible, but not very feasable.
This is the antidote.
The Federation of American Scientists, which cites 52 Nobel prizewinners among its sponsors, says a bomb made using just one piece of radioactive cobalt could make the city uninhabitable for decades, and seriously contaminate one thousand square kilometres of the states of New Jersey, Connecticut and New York.
One piece? Geez, that must have one heck of a specific activity, a lot higher than anything ever produced by normal production methods, such as neutron irradiation of pure cobalt. I'd guess maybe a cobalt-jacketed nuclear weapon would provide such an activity, but if the bad guys have one of those, there are other things to worry about than the cobalt contamination.
Sounds like this wacko's dispersion model is a bit skewed. NJ is to the west, so the prevailing winds would likely carry dispered material in the opposite direction. Same with CT to the north. The dispersion footprint is likely to the east and south. Rockaway and other areas on the south shore of LI would perhaps get a dusting from a blast in lower Manhatten. Midtown might cause contamination in Brooklyn and areas of LI east of there. Upper Manhatten means Queens gets a dusting, and probably areas on the North Shore a little further east.
He presented the results of a study – carried out by the federation and Princeton University – into what might happen if a bomb containing just a single "pencil" of intensely radioactive cobalt-60 was exploded at the southern tip of Manhattan on a calm day with a slight south-westerly breeze. Plants used to disinfect food by irradiation often contain hundreds of these "pencils", each just a foot long and an inch in diameter.
Rod sources of 60Co typically have activities in the range of a kilocurie or so. Disperse one of those over a reasonable-size footprint characteristic of a conventional explosive blast (an acre or so), assuming fairly fine dispersion of the source material, and you're talking whole-body doses in the range of tens of millrems per hour. Not lethal by any means. Cleanup? Well, cobalt is a fairly inert element in terms of its bio-activity. It just doesn't move around in the ecosystem very readily. So you go out and clean it up. Wash down surfaces and control the runoff. If its in the soil then you have to remove an inch or so layer from the top. Not hard for a limited area.
The danger, as the report makes clear, is not that the bomb would immediately kill people, although deaths would probably result from the force of the explosion. The real threat would come from long-term radioactive contamination, causing hundreds of thousands of fatalities from cancer over decades.
Baloney. Millirem exposures to a population in the range of perhaps thousands of people, statistically speaking, produce excess fatal cancers below detectable limits, perhaps less than one person from the group over a period of 30 years or so.
The investigation concluded that Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Times Square, and the swathe of New York stretching up to Central Park that contains most of its skyscrapers would become as contaminated as the no-go area permanently established around Chernobyl. One in 10 people who continued to live in a 300-block area downwind from the bomb would develop cancer. And a huge area stretching 70 miles downwind would be so badly affected that, under US government rules, it would have to be evacuated and the buildings decontaminated or destroyed. In practice, the study says, "demolition may be the only practical solution".
The "investigation" sounds more like a script for a sci fi movie. It sure isn't based in any kind of realistic data.
Could it happen? There would probably, as the federation points out, be little difficulty in finding radioactive material.
Sure, you can find it, a few microcuries here and there. Just go to a hardware store and get a smoke detector. But anything in the millicurie and above range, well, you have to have a license to get that, and, belive it or not, the NRC doesn't give out licenses to any monkey off the street, like the INS does entry visas.
Food-irradiation facilities are poorly guarded –
Bravo sierra. You're talking about shielded materials in storage pools protected by multiple entry barriers. And the material itself is self-protecting. Unshielded exposure to a kilocurie source of 60Co produces an exposure dose rate in the range of 10,000 rem per hour at about a foot or so away in air. Bad news for anyone trying to slap that onto a few sticks of dynamite.
...and the world is awash with similar, or even more dangerous, radioactive sources used in industry, medicine and university laboratories.
Such as...what? Over 99.99999999999999% of all licensed radioactive sources in medical use are things like tritium (a low energy beta emitter), 32P, 14C, and 99Tc. All relatively innocuous species in very dilute forms, not readily usable in a dispersion weapon.
Some two million sites in the US alone are licensed to use radioactive materials,
Yes, and what goes unsaid is that they use them in very low activity amounts, in very dilute forms. But in the context presented, most of the sheeple will say something like "Oh, my God! Shut those places down! Do it for the children! Of course, I think this is the author's agenda anyway. Given anything related to that "nasty, evil new-que-ler" business a black eye.
... and the government admits that 1,500 sources have gone missing over the past five years.
Yep, a microcurie here, a nanocurie there. So maybe you lose track of 1500 nanocurie-range source, and you end up with...a microcurie. BFD.
And last year President Bush cut the budget for protecting nuclear waste – and weapons – by 93 per cent.
Which still leaves more than enough to do the job, although some paper pushers in DC might have to actually work for a living somewhere else...
... an X-ray machine typically contains a radioactive source the size of a cod liver oil pill inside shielding as big as a coffee jar.
What is this crap? No x-ray machine that I ever used had a "source". They generally have a light in them to help the RT line up to beam, but no source of ionizing radiation. Sure, you turn on the tube and when that beam hits the target you get an x-ray source, but you turn off the beam and the "source" goes away. What is this goofball talking about here? Anyone have a clue?
A successful bomb would have to be designed with great sophistication, first to break open the "coffee jar", then to gradually heat the radioactive source so that it vaporised, and finally to scatter it to the winds.
Idiots. An explosion doesn't "gradually heat" anything. Its a quick pulse of energy. A conventional explosive does produce minor vaporization of the reaction mass, but very little or none of the attached materials. Too much energy is lost in the explosive expansion, which produces cooling at a rate faster than heating of the material from the chemical reaction. The energy leaks away too quickly to produce large-scale vaporization. Externally-driven dispersion is very localized.
I have found that reporters are skilled in exactly one thing -- the English language -- and often they are not even skilled with that! Every single time a reporter attempts to report about a field they don't have a higher education in, the end result is so fraught with complete mistatements of fact, glaring omissions, and utter balderdash that it is utterly frightening.
I know quite a bit about guns and more about computers. Whenever these reporters do an article about either of these topics, they get things so incredibly wrong, that I have learned not to trust them about topics I do not know about.
Thanks for your point-by-point debunking of this article.
A friend of mine put it this way: "If the media covered world events the way they cover science, we'd be reading about the bombing of Uzbekistan in retaliation for the destruction of the Empire State Building by Hindu terrorists who crashed a helicopter into it last October."
The only thing I can think of that might fit that description is an Iridium-192 source used to radiograph welds in pipes industrially. Like you said, medical x-rays are generated electronically without the use of a radioisotope.
And saving me all that typing.
Of course, anytime an articale starts with "50 Nobel Prize Winners Say" you know it's going to be swill.
What "Nobel Prize Winners" are they talking about? I'll bet a dollar that well known nuclear physicicst Bishop Desmond Tutu's on that list.
Makes me wonder what good is it to have freedom of information when so much of the information is bull-twinkees.
How much we act (consume) in this economy depends on how much our net worth is on paper. Just the stockmarket heading down wipes out huge amounts of percieved wealth. You know all this but I'm just putting this out there.
Hmmmm. OK, then, an industrial radiography system using a gamma source. Well, there are a few of those out there, not many, and I'm wondering if the author of this article (based on what he says elsewhere in it) is smart enough to know about those? But, anyway, those I am familiar with have sources in the tens or perhaps hundreds of curie range. They're pretty heavily shielded and just aren't the kind of things you walk off with. You'd need quite a few of those to cobble together the kilocurie-range source that would make even a moderately-effective dispersion weapon. Same with teletherapy sources in hospitals and vet clinics. We have a 6600-curie gamma knife that uses 60Co, but we needed a 20-ton rigger's crane to move it into the hospital room built especially for it, and even then its (shielded!) sources are behind multiple barriers against intrusion and unauthorzed use. Not the kind of thing one walks out the door with...
Didn’t some boob force the interlocks on an irradiator door in Sweden a few years back? As I recall, the source was stuck partially out and he forced the door interlocks and crawled into the labyrinth to have a look. I remember that he said he saw the exposed source, and decided to go home. He came down with immediate signs of radiation exposure and died a day or two later. If I recall, this source was like 20 Kilicuries with a dose rate of 40,000 R/Hr at 1 foot. Not the kind of thing one sticks in their lunch box and takes home.
"... and the government admits that 1,500 sources have gone missing over the past five years. Yep, a microcurie here, a nanocurie there. So maybe you lose track of 1500 nanocurie-range source, and you end up with...a microcurie. BFD"
A fair number of these lost sources are well logging sources that have become detached from the cutting tools down-hole, so they are lost inside thousands of feet of rock. Not exactly easy to recover. The NRC white sheets are full of these events.
I have to say however that foreign control of these low Curie sources is a lot less stringent. Here are a couple I remember:
1983 (Jan 16) Truck loaded with radioactive reinforcement rods takes a wrong turn in Los Alamos (NM) and trips radiation sensor; leads to uncovering of cancer therapy sources in Juarez scrap yard.
1984 (March) 30 Ci. Iridium-192 radiography source found by a laborer; kills entire family of eight in Mohammedia (Morocco).
- What if a 30 megaton bomb exploded over Mecca?
- How many hundreds of millions of Arabs would die in a retaliatory attack?
Someone show do a video that demonstrates these points very graphically and make sue that Al-Jazera gets a copy.
As far as foreign sources of material, I'm not sure there's much the domestic industry and regulators can do about that. I suppose the author of the article can take his writing to other countries like Kazikstan (sp?) or Iraq and try to stir up some self-righteous indignation among the local greens, but I don't like their chances, either of success or survival.
100% agreement. Let it all be known in public what the price to pay will be. That way if/when the Jihadists make a major attack on US soil the "moderate" Muslims will know who to blame as Mecca/Medina/Qum are vaporized. Will lead to a millennium of peace as Musli are finally schooled in good manners to the non Muslim.
BTW I think just a one megaton burst is enough over the three religious targets mentioned. Icing on the cake would be cruise missiles fired at the top one hundred Jehadi mosques and madrassas on this planet.
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