Comments on: Why dirty bombs matter

By: long_rifle

long_rifle — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:35:26 +0000

While there are more particles coming off the fires the concept is still exactly the same. Look up the fallout maps for the nuclear bomb tests the United States performed.

Much of it was carried aloft, and then dropped in rather concentrated patterns hundreds or thousands of miles away.

And please remember that there is a very big difference between fission/fusion by-products that are light and have a very short half-life which are what most far drifting “fallout” was. And the highly radioactive dense particles of waste and processed Uranium that would probably be used in a “dirty” bomb. The half-life could be in the ten’s of thousands of years.

It’s not a matter of “instant” death, but getting a steady dose of REM’s over a period of days or weeks.

By: Michael Lonie

Michael Lonie — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:13:07 +0000

Something small? The size of a shipping container perhaps? There is also the prospect of several small shipments being smuggled in and assembled into a bigger bomb within the country. And since we are talking about people willing to kill themselves so they can kill you, the prospect of being irradiated while working on it is not likely to deter them. They won’t expect to live long enough to experience the cancers or other results of the exposure, especially if they set off the bomb manually.

By: David Charlap

David Charlap — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:22:35 +0000

True, but…

I suspect a 45 square-mile wildfire is putting a lot more particles in the air than what you’d get from completely vaporizing any radioactive substance small enough to be smuggled into the country.

I can’t imagine something that small, and that dispersed, bringing a harmful amount of radioactivity 200 miles away. You probably get a larger radiation dose every day from cosmic rays.