Absolutely, although I don’t want to minimize the danger of a high-yield conventional explosive being detonated in a crowded urban area. That’s why we need to educate people and why the high level of scientific illiteracy in this country is a real danger.
Sure, let’s not worry and do nothing about the terrorists, after all, “they couldn’t do that much damage”, right?
So a few thousand people die immediately and several thousand may get cancer as a result, later, but that’s no reason to actually try to prevent a terrorist attack. Let’s just sit here “being smart” and wait for it to happen...
“One example is the radiological accident occurring in Goiânia, Brazil, between September 1987 and March 1988: Two metal scavengers broke into an abandoned radiotherapy clinic and removed a teletherapy source capsule containing powdered caesium-137 with an activity of 50 T Bq. They brought it back to the home of one of the men to take it apart and sell as scrap metal. Later that day both men were showing acute signs of radiation illness with vomiting and one of the men had a swollen hand and diarrhea. A few days later one of the men punctured the 1 mm thick window of the capsule, allowing the caesium chloride powder to leak out and when realizing the powder glowed blue in the dark, brought it back home to his family and friends to show it off. After 2 weeks of spread by contact contamination causing an increasing number of adverse health effects, the correct diagnosis of acute radiation sickness was made at a hospital and proper precautions could be put into procedure. By this time 249 people were contaminated, 151 exhibited both external and internal contamination of which 20 people were seriously ill and 5 people died.[11]”
From Wikipedia, which is also trying to set people’s mind at ease — what’s a dirty bomb explosion among friends in a big city...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb