1. Truck Full Of Radioactive Materials Stolen In Mexico
(This cannot be good)
A United Nations vehicle carrying radioactive materials was stolen in Mexico Monday while traveling to a radioactive waste storage center from the northern city of Tijuana.
2. New Mohamed art exhibition in Stockholm (I begin to really really appreciate lars Vilks)
3. Vigilante justice simmers in wake of WWII vet beating
(Is it the brutal racist black gang killings of white people causing a vigilante backlash or the government and media refusing to call it what it is and applying a vicious double standard against the law abiding that evokes a loss of a social contract? Frankly its a no brainer)
According to a story from the New York Daily News, Kenan Adams-Kindard and Demetrius Glenn, both 16, accused of murdering Delbert Belton in Spokane, WA are now in protective custody because of a bounty placed on their heads. The hunters have become the hunted.
In case you don’t recall, Mr Belton was the 88-year-old US Army World War II veteran who survived Okinawa, only to be – allegedly — beaten to death outside his car in the parking lot of a city ice rink in August.
4. Female genital mutilation a ‘huge problem’ in U.K.
Britain’s reputation for turning a blind eye on the illegal practice of female genital mutilation may be about to change after British doctors, nurses and midwifes decided to take a stand and demand it be treated as child abuse.
Earlier this month, leading British medical groups delivered an extensive report to Parliament, recommending aggressive steps to eradicate the practice, which is still being carried out on young girls from certain African, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures
(As expected, CBC and the UK decide to be actually racist to avoid being called racist for pointing at Islam as the problem here. Because the exact same racial groups that do this, also do not do this if they are Christian or Animist or anything but Muslim and typically an Imam is present or does the procedure)
Thank you Fjordman, M, Taffy in Canada, Richard and Bear. More to come.
#1 I can’t find the link or article but I remember a different truck with some type of hazardous material going missing in Mexico a couple of years ago.
#2 LOL
#4 Good for them
The girls seem the same age as grooming gang prey.
I luv Lars…
#1, that was all over the Nuclear Bulletin Board at my company. It was a Cesium 60 (C60) source that was used for radiotherapy that had reached the end of its life. It had something like 40-60 grams of material in it and about 1,000 Ci of activity remaining. Since it was C60 metal or pellets, its of little use for a dirty bomb. It was found opened in Mexico in a field after the truck was stolen. According to the physicists and field engineers on our BB, its likely the thieves died of exposure once they removed the shield from the source.
Actually my apologies, its Cobalt 60, not Cesium, which is isotope Cesium 137. I see and use C137 sources so often that its habit to think of it when I think of a nuclear source, but they are only 10 uCi so they are many orders of magnitude weaker than the one stolen. The initial activity was probably 40,000 Ci when the C60 source was new. Ci stands for Curie (after Marie Curie), which is 3.7 x 10^10 decays a second, so the stolen source was quite powerful.
So the stolen material would constitute a threat if it was mixed with conventional explosives? More than just the resulting panic?
Also is it possible the thieves were sophisticated enough to have reasonable protective gear? Hizb’allah is very active in Mexico and while vicious, not stupid.
Eeyore I would say you are right in both statements.
This source is big, but its only ~1,000 Ci remaining, its not strong enough to do serious damage over a large area. Further its not soluble as its a metal and not a salt so its harder to absorb. It would cause panic and disarray as cleanup was undertaken, but would not be potent enough to do real destruction. It would be more like a radiation leak from a power plant if someone ground it up and dispersed it with explosives. Better name for it was given by another physicist on the BB :”weapon of mass disruption”. It would cause a lot of chaos, and some long term cases of cancer, but not actual immediate death and destruction. Sources like this are not uncommon, and are dangerous, but not on the scale that a truly sophisticated terrorist would be looking for.
From the follow up reports, it sounds like it was an amateur local job as they opened it up in a field and just left it there. They found some suspects from the last I heard, some locals with one showing radiation exposure symptoms. Terrorists with half a brain would take the source and keep it to use in a larger device, and would likely smuggle it out to a safe location to open it, not in a random field. Perhaps that was its final intended destination, but someone probably died or got sick when they opened it, and they panicked and left it. Total mass of the source was confirmed to be about 40 grams. Dangerous, but no WMD.
People are excessively paranoid and hyperventilate at the mere mention of “radiation”. Even the title of the article claimed “truck full of radioactive material” when in reality it was a truck carrying a source bound for disposal. The upshot of this is that a terrorist could simply take this, tape it to a pipe bomb, set it off, and cause untold chaos without doing any real damage. That’s what ultimately bothers me: peoples paranoia gives them even more power to do us harm. Reporting it as a potential dirty bomb is media malpractice. It should have been reported correctly as a stolen source. The media should have further simply stated the description of the truck and the source and its containment, and a warning statement to not approach the device if its spotted, but instead call authorities so it can be contained and recovered. No, instead they chose to needlessly stir the pot and give the terrorists some more tools to use against us.
To put it in terms you can relate to, this story to radiation what Al Gore – Global Warming is to climate change: hysteria.
P.S. Vlad, last part isn’t directed at you, just to be clear 🙂
Just relaying some actual informed opinions from people who design and handle actual sources and venting over how the media handles things. The last thing we need to do is give terrorists more power than they already have.
No worries Adam, I gave that lecture to someone 2 days ago. ‘dirty bombs’ are weapons of terror that do damage because of what we think they do. I liken it to how the hippies put space travel back 40 years because of the hysteria they created around plutonium which made it impossible to use as a component of space exploration probes. Or much much worse, how the lefties made everyone abandon DDT to the cost of millions and millions of lives lost to malaria with virtually zero evidence that it causes problems. Certainly nothing like the scale not having it causes and it was orders of magnitude safer than the dangerous and ineffective crap that replaced it.