The removal was part of a continuing national project to recover
little-used radioactive materials that pose a threat to public health and
national security, according to a statement the agency made on
Monday. <<<<<<<
If there is this much radioactive material laying around in our country, can you imagine what can be found in some of the other countries?
Dr. Bill Wattenberg, has always said there is not a problem with getting it or the people who know how to use it in making a dirty bomb or a Hiroshima type bomb.
The Hiroshima bomb is a simple 'shotgun' type bomb.
In this case there is no possibility of using that material to construct a Hiroshima type bomb - it's simply the wrong element, it isn't capable of either a fission or a fusion reaction.
The Hiroshima type bomb requires a critical mass of an element that is capable of a fission reaction. It also has to be of a sufficient purity that the mass can be contained within the critical radius - these two numbers are specific to every fissionable material. That's going to be the biggest sticking point, since that requires a pretty good quantity of a sufficiently pure and specific isotope of the element - usually uranium or plutonium. There are a few somewhat tricky issues about the construction of the "shotgun" and the trigger mechanism but they aren't at all insurmountable once you have the reaction mass.
A dirty bomb is a whole other animal - almost any radioactive matieral will do, and the more radioactive the better. In fact uranium isn't a particularly good source since even the fissionable isotopes aren't radioactive enough (!). There are any number of such elements - radium, radon, cesium-137, etc. Once you have that (and it's just about everywhere - paricularly in hospitals), it's quite easy to construct a dirty bomb from it.
The barrier for constructing a "dirty" bomb is much, much lower than for a true nuclear bomb.