Thursday, June 14, 2007

Rosebud #124

Yikes:

"In the United States there are large quantities of nonfissionable but highly radioactive materials contained within machines, primarily in hospitals and at industrial sites, and the machines, because they are expensive, are sometimes stolen for resale. In fact in the United States alone there are hundreds of thefts of radioactive material every year. As to why no dirty bomb has yet been assembled and used, analysts provide earnest explanations, but largely to avoid throwing up their hands in wonder.

It turns out that the world is rich with fresh, safe, user-friendly Highly Enriched Uranium -- a global accumulation (outside of our collective thirty thousand nuclear warheads) that is dispersed among hundreds of sites and further separated into nicely transportable, necessarily subcritical packages. The practical question is how to pick some up."

—The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, William Langewiesche, 2007, pp. 18, 27.
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