So, ISIS now can make a dirty nuclear bomb?

According to The Independent, according to the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, Nato has expressed deep concerns about the materials seized by Isis from research centres and hospitals that would normally only be available to governments.

  1. Which “nuclear research facilities” have they seized? (If they have, particularly within Iraq, someone’s got some 'splaining to do.)

  2. How hard is it to make a dirty bomb? We’re are all Top-Secret security cleared, so anyone who really knows can just go ahead.

  1. Get plutonium
  2. get conventional explosive (C4)
  3. attach plutonium to bomb
  4. explode bomb

It’s step 1 that is difficult.

Exactly. A dirty bomb isn’t really a nuclear device (and, thus, far less complicated to build). It’s just a large conventional bomb which uses the explosion to disperse nasty radioactive material in a large area.

I saw in a documentary(don’t remember the name) that the only real danger from a dirty bomb is the explosive in it. The nuclear material is more of a dramatic scare tactic than a real threat. The radiation gets spread over such a large area that there isn’t much real threat from it as it is too diffuse.

A “dirty bomb” doesn’t even require an isotope that can go boom (plutonium or U-235), just something radioactive (which could be something like an isotope of cesium). Such isotopes could have been used in various medical applications (such as radiation therapy to zap cancer), and wouldn’t have to come from anybody’s nuclear bomb program or any place else military or “national security” in nature.

Radioactive stuff used for medicine and research is nasty enough to make a dirty bomb. Lets hope they don’t hire the Radioactive Boyscout to figure out how to make that stuff nastier first.

Having said that, IMO the stuff they probably have their hands on isn’t an actual risk. The risk is them using it, scaring the shit out of a bunch of people, causing panic, and making for one pain in the ass clean up effort after the fact.

The numbers of caused cancers would likely be the same order of magnitude as the deaths caused by the explosive force of the bomb having been placed in a dense urban area.

So now there’s nuclear materials in Iraq? :dubious:

That’s not really true. A small amount of the right (wrong) radioactive material can get into your lungs and cause cancer, possibly many years later. You’d have to look at each type of radioactive material to determine real risk presented, but many sources of radiation are much more dangerous if inhaled or ingested. The lungs often can’t remove small particulates, and thus the radiation can get trapped in the body and released over a long period of time.

A dirty bomb won’t render entire cities uninhabitable, but it will create a justified concern about protecting both the cleanup crews and the inhabitants. Maybe this concern only translates to a few dozens or hundreds of cancer deaths years from now, but that’s still a valid concern.

Of course, a dirty bomb is a little harder to make than some posters are saying here. If all you do is strap a bomb to a bunch of radioactive material, you may not get an optimal dispersion. Ideally, you’d want someone with the technical know-how to put it together. I’m sure ISIS has some of those, but not all that many.

As a data point. I can’t cite the cite but about 10 years ago give or take I managed to run across an academic article. Pretty sure it was a serious per reviewed journal.

The article looked at the consequences of a WELL made dirty bomb exploded in the heart of a major city.

Their conclusion was that deaths by cancers (both long and short term ones) were less than the immediate deaths caused by the event. Clean up wise a royal pain in the ass though.

These were people that knew how to do the calculations. And IIRC it wasn’t some trivial short paper either.

Take that if you like for a benchmark.

But for terrorists, it doesn’t really matter if the “dirt” got everywhere equally, or was not optimally dispersed. We still have to clean every square inch no matter what. The people living or working in the area would still demand it. This is America - you know there will be lawsuits.

So as a terror tactic, it doesn’t have to be a quality made bomb.

As has been noted it is not fissionable material but rather stuff used in labs and medical devices. You can’t make those things into an atomic bomb but the stuff is nasty enough that you don’t want it spread all over the place.

That’s definitely true.

And it kind of gets back to Billfish’s response. I don’t doubt that the actual deaths will be relatively minimal, though I do still question whether the bomb itself would kill more than the radiation. I guess it would depend a lot on placement and design. Anyway, the true effectiveness as a terror weapon is the fact that we have to clean it up - regardless of how small the radiation danger is, it’s large enough that civilians will insist on the cleanup.

There have been a number of accidental deaths resulting from improperly disposed of medical radioisotopes (cobalt seems to be a major contributor but it’s not the only one). These aren’t cancer deaths, they’re deaths from acute radiation sickness. Cancer deaths in other people from these incidents is still a possibility.

So yeah, take the radioactive stuff out of the right type of medical imaging machine (which are all over the world at this point) and use a conventional explosive to disperse it. It won’t effectively cover a wide area, but in a more confined space it could be lethal to bystanders. It would be a pain in the ass to clean up. It would cause fear and panic.

Or just spread the crap on someone’s dinner - there was that incident in the UK involving sushi seasoned with polonium. Poison a village well. There’s probably other types of mayhem I haven’t thought of, and don’t particularly want to.

Certainly the potential is there. Whether it will actually happen or not only time will tell.

It’d be more dangerous if they used dioxin or some other chemical carcinogen instead of radioactive material, because the cleanup for radioactive material is much simpler. The hard part of the cleanup is knowing when you’re done, which means being able to detect the contamination. That’s really easy for radioactive material.

I think the focus on causing cancer is a distraction, I suspect anyone using a dirty bomb is at least as interested in immediate/short term death as the long term risks. It’s like chemical weapons - no one uses a carcinogen, they use stuff like chlorine and mustard gas which cases immediate problems.

Think of dirty bombs as “area denial” weapons.

As such, they could be very disruptive, regardless of how many deaths they cause.

To put this into perspective, how much radioactive material would you find in an average US hospital radiology department?

Radio therapy department. As noted earlier - cobalt sources are around, and there have been some horrid cases of deaths when the sources were improperly (ie sent to the local tip) disposed of. For reasons that are probably obscure, the cobalt sources sometimes get called “cobalt bombs”. They usually live at the bottom of a long tube in the ground, inside a little concrete home. They get mechanically hauled out, up into the radiotherapy room where they sit in a box with appropriate shutters arranged to limit the radiation to where it is wanted.

The usual problems with weaponising anything nasty probably apply. It isn’t enough to just strap it to a bomb. Trying to make a dirty bomb with a cobalt source is probably a great way to dispose of a large number of militants via acute radiation poisoning. You will die after even a short close range exposure to such a naked source.

Weren’t there some deaths in like El Salvador form people stealing hospital equipment and selling it as scrap metal?

Medical Cobalt-60 sources may get called ‘cobalt bombs’ but the term “Cobalt bomb” is normally used when referring to salted or enhanced radiation nuclear bombs, which are certainly not in the realm of ‘made up in a terrorist basement” dirty bombs. ( add cobalt to bomb – make go boom, lots of high energy radioactive fall out.

The cases where people have died from radiation exposure from Co-60 are generally confined to situations where the people did not realize they were in close proximity to something pretty dangerous, and so didn’t take any avoiding actions, thus received a lethal dose over several days and died. Think there were also cases of people trying to steal strontium nuclear powered batteries used to power radio beacons in remote [arts of former Soviet Union, not sure wht the exposure time was as those things can be quite toasty. Anyway mostly the deaths are not knowing they were exposed and sustained exposure .

If a terrorist bomb were to go off, it is probable that some testing of the area would be under taken, which would quickly show radioactive material was involved. Once you know that, radioactive contamination is pretty easy to detect ( sure some radio nuclides are pure alpha or beta emitters, but they are generally close in time to a metastable state that will kick out a gamma ray which are easy to detect) thus you can start the clean up. And you don’t have to clean up everything, just the contaminated stuff.
If a large source was attached to bomb, I would imagine there would be a lot of people moving around and spreading contamination until a radiation survey was done ( carting people off to hospital etc) but could you get exposed to enough radioactive material to provide a concentrated enough dose to people in the immediate vicinity? I would doubt it, the dispersal would spread things pretty thinly, and certainly create a mess, maybe a slight increase in cancer risk to people who didn’t get washed down in day or so.