That’s in war.
For terrorist purposes, making a large area a no man’s land for 50+ years*, and having people in a much wider area blame every case of cancer on your group (even if the actual increase in incidence is modest), might be considered a significant win.
Which is what many projections of a cobalt-60 bomb suggest would happen, at least sans cleanup. I don’t know how effectively you could decontaminate an area with significant cobalt-60 dose spread by a dirty bomb, and I’m not sure anyone else does either.
You’re probably thinking of the Goiania accident in Brazil. The linked article also mentions what clean up required. There was also an incident in Thailand and if I recall correctly one in India as well.
Some thieves stole a truck carrying such a device in Mexico, but when the authorities publicized what it was that had been stolen they abandoned the object (thanks guys - leave it in a field and run away, why don’t you?) and apparently had not gotten into it.
The problem is that these sources can be either very small grain size or dust-like, so they get spread around the environment easily if carelessly handled.
You know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both atomically bombed and for darn sure no one abandoned them for 50+ years.
The Goiania site was decontaminated.
Decontamination would be annoying, expensive, and inconvenient but I don’t think a dirty bomb is going to result in a site being “no go” for decades.
It would depend a lot on the exact nature of the area bombed. For example, if it was mainly contained in a building, then you could follow many of the same principles we use for asbestos and mold control. You’d basically strip the building down to its frame and foundation and rebuild. You might have to limit workers to a certain number of hours on the project to limit radiation exposure, but the risk from a dirty bomb is more likely to be inhalation of radioactive particles rather than total radiation exposure just thanks to the fact that the bomb disperses the radioactive material so widely.
In an outdoor space, you might have more issues, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we just sprayed everything down with fire hoses and did our best to collect the resulting waste water and mud.
That was not an attempt to spread radioactive material. That was a single radiotherapy device stolen from a hospital and most of the source never moved from one site.
Maybe. The data however seems rather limited and speculative.
An actual nuclear bomb made to be a dirty bomb (neutron bomb/cobalt bomb and the like).
A regular bomb that has some radioactive substances mixed in/surrounding it (what ISIS is likely to brew up).
The difference in scale in terms of just radioactivity/amount of radioactive material/amount of local material MADE radioactive between these is very very large.
The nuclear energy industry has significant experience in decontamination, particularly during nuclear reactor decommissioning. The fuel rods are one thing but there is also the whole primary containment which could be akin to the immediate area of a dirty bomb and secondary containment which would the wider dispersal area. Co-60 was a significant contamination product ( well it was in the SGHWR I was working at for a year)
The primary containment areas involved cutting and removing steel parts ( best removed rather than left to corrode) , high pressure jetting of the top layers of concrete to actually remove the concrete and send all to appropriate long term storage. primary containment is not face melting fuel rod levels or radiation,
and obviously we haven’t defined how much cobalt in this hypothetical dirty bomb or what the dispersal was, but if it was in a bomb and dispersed it is not going to be giving the same intensity of dose as the contained sources mentioned in the accidents with people in contact with the source for extended periods of time.)
Secondary containment was wash down, remove and monitor parts and send to appropriate storage or free release, and the odd high pressure jetting if some concrete with recovery of the cuttings.
Anyway there is a lot of experience out there in decontamination
On the other hand, significant fallout was produced, which is indisputably radioactive, and a large area was affected.
Let’s see - taken from original medical facility to a scraper’s home in a wheelbarrow. Both the scrapers involved got radiation poisoning. One of them eventually had an arm amputated as the radiation had done so much damage it became gangrenous.
Sold to a scrapyard
Scrapyard owner notice pretty blue glow, takes grains/powder from scrapyard to home, where bits of it get everywhere, including all over the floor and into the food off a young child.
Sold to a second scrapyard.
After people started getting severely ill one of their relatives recalled the mysterious blue power, retrieved it from the second scrapyard, and transported it in a plastic bag to the hospital treating people.
250 people contaminated. 20 sick. 4 dead. Topsoil had to be removed from multiple sites. Several houses wound up demolished and the bits carted away. Two houses needed their roofs replaced! The wiki article linked lists the six sites with greatest contamination.
I have to dispute your assertion that it “never moved from one site”. Seems that stuff got around.
No, it’s not exactly like a dirty bomb. Nor were the 1945 bombings like a dirty bomb. The point here is that radioactivity, either accidentally or deliberately, has injured/killed/contaminated areas in the past. The only one that has actually resulted in a “no-go” area of any significant size was Chernobyl. An ISIS built dirty bomb is unlikely to be as bad as that, just because of the sheer volume of material that would be required.
My understanding is, the problems with dirty bombs are dispersal and transport. Dispersing the material to effect a large number of people is very difficult. Its really more a terror/psychological weapon than a WMD. Secondly, is safe transport. How do you find a dirty bomb? Follow the trail of shit and vomit. Safeguards that make transporting these safely to a site make them even harder to disperse.
“The research concluded that high-level radiation was measured at the center of the explosions, with a low level of dispersal of radiation by particles carried by the wind,” the newspaper wrote Monday. “Sources at the reactor said this doesn’t pose a substantial danger beyond the psychological effect.”
Basically - it is a way to create an enormous backlash against yourself without causing your enemy much damage.
You’re right sorry: two sites – two scrapyards. So just like a dirty bomb then.
But you’re comparing apples and oranges. Your argument seems to be “We can handle the effects of things which weren’t dirty bombs, so we can handle a dirty bomb” which seems to me a specious argument.
Now, as it happens a number of recent analyses, such as by the US Department of Energy, have suggested that decontamination would be possible and/or the dose over a large area would be negligable. That works as a counter to concerns about dirty bombs.
And if you had advanced that better argument what I would have said is that many of those analyses readily admit the data is limited, so we cannot just declare matter-of-factly that a dirty bomb would have no lasting effects.
Two scrapyards and a private home. Not to mention on several persons who were walking around and dispersing it. Did you really completely miss that two homes had to have roofs replaced, and more than one had to be knocked down and carted off?
It’s very annoying how you keep ignoring these points. It makes me thing you didn’t bother to read my post summarizing the contamination, much less the link.
Since we’ve never had a dirty bomb go off no, we don’t really know what the exact effects would be. You seem to be arguing that we can’t even speculate based on past accidents or current knowledge about radioactivity and contamination.
“Decontamination” of a building can involve completely knocking it down, hauling off the wreckage to radiation waste facility, then removing 6 inches of soil underneath it. That’s not trivial, particularly if it’s your home and everything you own. It’s expensive, destructive, expensive, time-consuming, and expensive.
Low level contamination over a large area can be more problematic than a concentrated high-level hot spot. Removing one problem shed (see “radioactive boyscout”) is a lot easier than decontaminating a couple acres of homes, streets, and lawns.
Governments don’t give a flip if their methods leave essentially a hole in the ground where your home used to be. People do care about those things, which is one of the reasons a dirty bomb would be so effective at causing psychological damage. Governments don’t care if the chance of a child having cancer in his or her lifetime is slightly raised, parents do care, very much. Governments have a crapload of money to spend on fixing a problem, individual citizens do not. What a government considers an adequate clean up may or may not be what individuals affected consider an adequate clean up.
Yes, we CAN clean up the mess, we won’t have “no-go” zones, but the impact isn’t trivial, either.
Since it is clear you have either not read my argument, or haven’t comprehend it (since you continually miscount how may locations were affected in the Brazil incident) you have no basis on which to judge my argument.
My instinctive reaction to this was “well, yeah, but it’s not like you can take these guys at their word on this, any more that you have to take every threatening tweet pic of a public place captioned “SOON.” that these assholes publish”. Of course they’re going to claim they’ve got scary stuff - their job description is* scaring people*.
Then I clicked on your link, and I had to laugh out loud. Here’s the claims in question, for posterity reference :
“Yes, we have Doomsday Device ! What is doomsday device btw, and also fucking magnets how do they work ?!”
See, this is why you don’t found organizations that rely on its members being dumber than a sack of rocks to function. This is Austin Powers henchman level ineptitude right there. And I’m supposed to quake in my booties because of this brain trust ?
The point is that it’s nothing like a dirty bomb. Most of the material never left the canister, and the few grams that did only went to a small number of sites.
As for missing that two homes had roofs replaced, a couple demolished etc, yes of course I read that. How does it support your point that decontamination is relatively easy? How would that approach scale up when many sites have been affected?
Not at all. I’m simply saying you are picking very poor examples to speculate from.
Um… I’m not sure I’m the one who described decontamination as “relatively easy”. It’s certainly possible. That’s not the same as “easy”.
How many sites do you think would be affected by a dirty bomb? A lot depends on the environment in which one is detonated. Blowing one off in a street between skyscrapers will have a notably different effect that doing so on a street with dispersed one story buildings or in a crowded street market. What is the size of the bomb? What are the weather conditions? (High winds will disperse dust more than still air). How big is the bomb? How much radioactive material? Is it “just” a dusty bomb or does it also contain shrapnel so stuff will be driven into flesh rather than settling on top of peoples’ skin? How does the radioactive material react chemically with the surrondings? (Low grade uranium, for example, might well kill someone from chemical poisoning of the kidneys long before the radiation kills them.)
It’s not just scaling up the explosive, there are a bunch of other factors at work, too.
If it is a small dirty bomb going off inside a building that’s a different situation than a suicide bomber blowing up in a crowded open-air market.
So, people who think a dirty bomb constructed by a group like ISIS is going to be a radioactive disaster on part with Hiroshima or Chernoyl or Fukushima are, shall we shall, overreacting just a bit. People who poo-poo all that and think it will be no different than any other IED are on the other extreme. It would be somewhere between the extremes, where exactly we aren’t going to know until it actually happens.
Why are they poor examples?
We have never had a dirty bomb blow up. We have had accidents with radioactive materials. Medical radioactives are some of those most likely to be scavanged and used in a dirty bomb. What has happened in the past when the stuff inside medical devices has been pulled out and dispersed?
What do you think would be better examples to use in speculation?
Nobody’s saying that it wouldn’t do any damage. Any bomb will do damage, with or without the radioactive material. The relevant question is whether a dirty bomb would do more or less damage than a conventional one on which they spent the same amount of resources. The time, money, and effort used to get that radioactive material could have been used to get how much more fertilizer, fuel oil, and ball bearings?