[John H K]

I'll take a wild stab at what this is.....

Back during the Y2K frenzy, the Y2K nutters became obsessed with NRC event reports at the NRC website(which report everything from the slightest screw coming loose or whatsadohickey needing a new battery, to an emergency shutdown -which actually are fairly common - in every Nuke plant in the US.)

Included back then were reports every single time a piece of NRC-registered of radioactive material was missing or stolen.

This includes TENS of thousands of items, all sorts of fairly routine industrial and medical equipment, often with pretty trivial amounts of Cesium or something in them; it's not always (in fact, pretty much never is) a 50 lb. box of plutonium or something.

So you'd see one of these reports every couple days or so, somebody would have some piece of equipment they left in the back of their pickup truck and their pickup truck got stolen, etc. But I think due to regs there usually ends up being some sort of FBI involvement when it happens.

I vaguely remember reading something about the stolen or missing radioactive equipment item reports no longer being public since 9/11.

But it's not necessarily not routine.

[Black Cat]

I was watching when the anchorman said that and about jumped out of my chair...

But he said it was a "raw report" and stuff like that has no business making the air. We had similar cases on 9-11-01 with the stuff about bombs going off in Washington, etc.

I realize that crisis time is ratings time and the more spectacular the claim, the more the viewers pay attention. But this is the very worst kind of journalism. It's at times like this when the press needs to be the most careful to get it RIGHT, not necessarily get it FIRST.