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2005-01-19 Home Front: WoT
Drudge Reporting - FBI: Search For 'dirty Bomb' In Boston
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Posted by Steve 2005-01-19 4:24:13 PM|| || Front Page|| [11137 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Oh, great. This should be a fun commute home.
Posted by tu3031 2005-01-19 4:35:36 PM||   2005-01-19 4:35:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#2 Probably will amount to nothing again, but if not, anyone care to lay odds that the "suspicious person" ain't named Frank or John?

If there's a "suspicious person" in the area, then perhaps releasing a description of said "suspicious person" would help find him.

Just a thought.
Posted by Laurence of the Rats  2005-01-19 4:37:30 PM|| [http://www.punictreachery.com/]  2005-01-19 4:37:30 PM|| Front Page Top

#3  " a suspicious person that may be in the area "

Must be John Kerry
Posted by tex 2005-01-19 4:43:52 PM||   2005-01-19 4:43:52 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 Actually tu, the commute home will suck anyway for the usual seasonal weather-related reasons...

I, for one, am shocked, SHOCKED, that this is taking place in the deepest bowels of blue America... /michaelmoore
Posted by Carl in N.H.  2005-01-19 4:45:35 PM||   2005-01-19 4:45:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 Nah, can't be Kerry. He actually went to work, for a change.
Posted by BH 2005-01-19 4:45:49 PM||   2005-01-19 4:45:49 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 You cannot get at the Boston Herald piece anymore because of traffic but the little I read of it, before being iterrupted, sounded pretty vague and involved an anonymous tip from a illegal alien smuggler
Posted by TomAnon 2005-01-19 4:48:25 PM||   2005-01-19 4:48:25 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 Don't worry. This is only a "war."

/sarcasm

Stop 'em.
Posted by Graick Thrutle1332 2005-01-19 4:58:44 PM||   2005-01-19 4:58:44 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 A law enforcement source, speaking under the condition of anonymity, stated that authorities are searching for 6-8 men, reportedly from Iraq accompanied by suspects of Asian origin- with science backgrounds.
Posted by Dutchgeek 2005-01-19 5:01:55 PM|| [http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/default.asp]  2005-01-19 5:01:55 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 Suspects named and mugshots posted:


"Adam Yahiye Gadahn. Date of birth used: Sept. 1, 1978. Height: 5-11. Weight: 190 pounds. A U.S. citizen, this man also goes by the names Adam Pearlman, Abu Suhayb Al- Amriki, Abu Suhayb, Yihya Majadin Adams and Yayah."
(others at link)

AC inside source: This is being taken very seriously indeed. It is still probably a hoax but there is additional critical information that has not been released. Can't say more for now.
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 5:21:57 PM||   2005-01-19 5:21:57 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 That loser again? He looks like an escapee from a How-To-Be-A-Goth convention.
Posted by Laurence of the Rats  2005-01-19 5:28:54 PM|| [http://www.punictreachery.com/]  2005-01-19 5:28:54 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 " Nah, can't be Kerry. He actually went to work, for a change "

Giving C. Rice a hard time is hardly what I call work. Kerry is freakin pig ass !!
Posted by Bill Clinton 2005-01-19 5:32:13 PM||   2005-01-19 5:32:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 Gadahn is the best-known AQ fugitive in the US, unless you want to count Clark, Hersh, Al-Qatie Qouric et al, who are technically not fugitives but unindicted co-conspirators.
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 5:42:26 PM||   2005-01-19 5:42:26 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 The TV show "24" is getting grief these days because this season the “sleeper cell” that is bent on a terrorist act is Muslim.

Those wacky “24” producers…where on earth do they come up with these ideas??
Posted by Justrand 2005-01-19 5:50:57 PM||   2005-01-19 5:50:57 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 AC - Lol! Unindicted is unfortunately right, heh.
Posted by .com 2005-01-19 5:51:14 PM||   2005-01-19 5:51:14 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 Just - I saw the first 2 hour show (missed the followup the next night, damnit!) and throughout the show it kept occurring to me that whomever is writing the show is smart, well-informed, and calling a spade a spade. Figured it would be cancelled by Muslim protests, lol!

Fug'em. If I can remember, I'll try to watch it - it really was a decent drama with the most timely topic possible. Let's hope that shitloads of American watch it.
Posted by .com 2005-01-19 5:54:43 PM||   2005-01-19 5:54:43 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 Wouldn't a dirty bomb require a significant amount of radioactive material packed around some conventional bomb? Wouldn't the conventional bomb be something like a ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel oil)? It would also seem that after Oklahoma City and WTC I, it would be more difficult to obtain ANFO components. It would also seem that it would be difficult to obtain a sufficient amount of radioactive material to contaminate a large area. I don't know, it just seems that way to me.
Posted by John Q. Citizen 2005-01-19 5:56:26 PM||   2005-01-19 5:56:26 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 JQC, it might be best not to discuss improvised explosive formulations in any detail online.

Just the same, the ingredients for ANFO are still widely available, they are manufactured in huge amounts, they are crucial to the national economy, and there is just no way to control access to them.
Also, a dirty bomb wouldn't require much of it, certainly nothing like the two tons Tim McVeigh to blow up the Murrah building.
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 6:09:07 PM||   2005-01-19 6:09:07 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 Problem with radiological weapons is that they are pure terror weapons and rely more on panic than actual damage or lethality. Besides, if one is crazy enough, it is not too hard to get scrapped x-ray machines in Mexican junkyards and open up their source boxes for the isotopes. Whole load of cast iron lawn furniture got returned to Mexico because of an accident involving an old x-ray machine, that was several years ago.
So no, 20 or 30 pounds of plastique and a couple of pounds of isotope, and a city is devastated - even though most of the death and injuries are caused by the panic.
Posted by Crinesing Unomomble9253 2005-01-19 6:09:18 PM||   2005-01-19 6:09:18 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 I suspect that to get the effect of a dirty bomb all you would pretty much have to do is explode it then say SAY is was a dirty bomb. Maybe throw in a old radium dial watch for effect.

Throw the whole city in a tizzy.

Posted by Michael  2005-01-19 6:10:35 PM||   2005-01-19 6:10:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#20 Whole load of cast iron lawn furniture got returned to Mexico because of an accident involving an old x-ray machine, that was several years ago.

Glad to hear someone was on their toes about the lawn furniture. The other comments are reason for concern but not panic. Hope law enforcement and Federal agencies are on top of things.
Posted by John Q. Citizen 2005-01-19 6:19:36 PM||   2005-01-19 6:19:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#21 #18
I was directly involved in running down the Mexican radiology incident. It started not with an X-Ray machine (which aren't radioactive) but with an old cobalt-pellet radiation-therapy machine.
A hospital here in Lubbock sold the machine to a clinic in Mexico, complete with its requisite supply of radioactive cobalt isotopes. The machine broke down and was left derelict, after which the clinic went out of businees. Its assets, including the unrepairable and now unrecognized cobalt machine, were auctioned off. One of the buyers was a scrap dealer who sold his haul, including the cobalt machine, to a Mexican steel mill. The mill used the scrap in a batch of steel that was then used to make structural beams, among other things.

The whole things came to light by an amazing quirk of fate. Some of the beams were sold to an American contractor. The truck-driver hauling them got lost after he crossed the border. In the middle of nowhere, he spotted what he took for an isolated police post and pulled in for directions. He had actually entered a security gate at the White Sands Proving Ground, one of the few places in the country where state-of-the- art radiation detectors routinely come into contact with civilian traffic. The detectors went off the scale, responding to the radioactive cobalt in the beams. The innocent driver was hustled away to the FBI office, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team was called in, and the hunt was on.
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 6:25:03 PM||   2005-01-19 6:25:03 PM|| Front Page Top

#22 Steve: This is a newsworthy posting- thanks for the info. it is the first I had heard. Let us all hope that no terrorist action occures in Boston or anywhere else in the U.S. (It is all a matter of time). I am alarmed at some of the posting's.....I don't take this lightly or as a joking matter.

Andrea Jackson
Posted by Andrea  2005-01-19 6:33:27 PM||   2005-01-19 6:33:27 PM|| Front Page Top

#23 I did some work at Oak Ridge at one time. There were ponds with low level radioactive waste from the WW II era. Routinely, frogs, ducks, deer, and trees would be checked to see if they glowed in the dark, i.e were radioactive. Most of these ponds have been drained and cleaned up.
Posted by John Q. Citizen 2005-01-19 6:36:54 PM||   2005-01-19 6:36:54 PM|| Front Page Top

#24 I've got one for you, AC. Up there in Panhandle country the ground water is pretty interesting. I worked on a program that predicted the constriction of producing wells from interior pipe build-up of minerals - via lab testing the ground water produced. A batch of wells up there was closing in and a field trip was in order. The pipe was tripped out when it closed in and stored on a concrete pad with a cyclone fence around it. These wells were on a dairy farm. The cow path that Elsie & Co followed each day, to and from the barn, went right by this pad. We arrived and the instant the Geiger counter was turned on, it pegged - at every range selection. We were about 10 yards from this stack of pipe. Strontium, cesium, and good old calcium carbonate as the binder. Heh. That pipe was whisked out of there by 8:30AM the next day. Dunno where it went, but there were no logged phone calls, no memos, no nothing in the company files. I am certain the farmer wasn't told. An ee cummings classic comes to mind: "I've never seen a purple cow, and I never hope to see one. But from the milk we're getting now, there certainly must be one." Heh, heh.
Posted by .com 2005-01-19 6:36:54 PM||   2005-01-19 6:36:54 PM|| Front Page Top

#25 AC I am from lubbock ... that is so interesting ... my Dad worked at white sands missle range many moons ago
Posted by legolas 2005-01-19 6:38:43 PM||   2005-01-19 6:38:43 PM|| Front Page Top

#26 Excellant, Legolas.
I live about three blocks from the Covenant Medical Center, the old Methodist Hospital where the renegade cobalt machine originated. The hospital in Lubbock was held blameless in the episode, but the Mexican authorities threw the book at the bankrupt clinic owners who had failed to dispose of the machine properly.

.com. I've heard, but cannot verify, that a fair amount of the pipe used in Project Gas Buggy was unaccounted for afterward.
Gas Buggy was a hare-brained "Atoms-for-Peace" plan that tried to free trapped natural gas by pulverizing the surrounding rock with nuclear explosives. The experiments were conducted in SW Colorado, with live shots in gas-bearing strata. It worked beautifully, but the resulting gas was radioactive.
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 6:48:34 PM||   2005-01-19 6:48:34 PM|| Front Page Top

#27 It is an open secret in the awl bidness that there are some remarkably hot spots around the country. One of the best insides jokes has to do with Louisiana when they started up their own State EPA office. They declared a "safe" radiation level that was lower than the background level of return water for everywhere in the state that the people I worked for had ever seen produced. If they had followed LA State Law, every drop of produced water (with the oil / gas) would have had to be treated as Hazardous Waste - the whole nine yards. What actually occurred, with every company - else LA would've had zero oil / gas production and gone bankrupt - was that the produced water was trucked to the coast and dumped in the Gulf. Lol, there are some truly stupid people in Gov't... Stories abound, lol!
Posted by .com 2005-01-19 7:02:13 PM||   2005-01-19 7:02:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#28 I was aware that some forms of coal are hot.
I hadn't heard about oil/gas.
Then again, the US Capitol bldg is measurably radioactive.
Posted by Dishman  2005-01-19 7:18:27 PM||   2005-01-19 7:18:27 PM|| Front Page Top

#29 DoE on Project Gasbuggy

Gasbuggy was part of the "Plowshare" program for finding peaceful uses for nuclear explosives.

For pure reckless insanity, my favorite Plowshare proposal was to use shallow multi-megaton nuke detonations to blast a new canal across Central America.


"The 1962 "Sedan" plowshares shot displaced 12 million tons of earth and created a crater 320 feet deep and 1,280 feet wide." (this was 104 kilotons)
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 7:20:41 PM||   2005-01-19 7:20:41 PM|| Front Page Top

#30 Okay, my bad. I misremember the machine type, but the basics are the same : source box for isotopes and voila - radiological weapon base.
Plus, go to top of tall building, detonate with minor shaping to plastique to insure wind dispersal, and major league ensues.
Posted by Crinesing Unomomble9253 2005-01-19 7:21:09 PM||   2005-01-19 7:21:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#31 I don't think anything is being revealed here that isn't known. MSM has had stories in Time or Newsweek with how such things would be done--graphics and all.
Posted by John Q. Citizen 2005-01-19 7:28:37 PM||   2005-01-19 7:28:37 PM|| Front Page Top

#32 AC - I live out by target ... always enjoy your insights.
Posted by legolas 2005-01-19 7:29:51 PM||   2005-01-19 7:29:51 PM|| Front Page Top

#33 #28 Dishman

Coal typically contains 1-3 ppm uranium and about three times that much thorium. This is concentrated in the combustion residue (ash) when the coal is burned, with the result that the coal industry is dumping about 800 tons of uranium into the environment every year without a peep of protest from anti-nuke luddites.
If recovered and used in reactors, this uranium would generate more power than was produced by burning the coal from which it was derived.

Some scientists have actually suggested mining ash-heaps at coal-fired powerplants as a readily available source of uranium. Utility companies are naturally pretty skittish about this potential source of additional income. In fact, one local utility would not allow me to take radiation readings from their ash-heaps, declaring that I would have to have a federal court order for this.

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 7:30:01 PM||   2005-01-19 7:30:01 PM|| Front Page Top

#34 Granite too.
Posted by John Q. Citizen 2005-01-19 7:31:36 PM||   2005-01-19 7:31:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#35 JQ
Indeed. An average specimen of granite generates enough heat from radioactive decay to vaporize itself in about 600,000 years if it were perfectly insulated.
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 7:37:07 PM||   2005-01-19 7:37:07 PM|| Front Page Top

#36 I wonder what the background level is in my back yard. : live on/near the 25 Hill oil field in Taft Ca.

Dirty bombs are "terror" weapons in the true sense. They really would not cause that many casualties.
Posted by Sock Puppet of Doom 2005-01-19 8:08:02 PM|| [http://www.slhess.com]  2005-01-19 8:08:02 PM|| Front Page Top

#37 Speaking of harebrained schemes. We in Alaska had a proposed 2.4 megaton blast Plowshare project called Project Chariot at Cape Thomson near Point Hope, Alaska, on the northwest coast. This was around 1958. The AEC did alot of work up there, even brought in low level radioactive waste for tracer studies to see where radioactive debris would go after the blast. People got wind of the project and it was stopped. One of the people that blew the whistle was a Univ of Alaska Fairbanks researcher named William Pruitt (maybe Fred's distant relative). UAF was heavily loaded up with US govt research money, so Dr. Pruitt got into trouble for blowing the whistle. There even was made sort of a limerick about it.

There was a young doctor named Pruitt
Who found fallout in Caribou suett
If I tell Dr. Wood, he'll tell me to be good
And I'll rue it
Said Pruitt
So screw it
I'll do it

More info on Project chariot here

Info on the radioactive tracer studies on the project site here.
Posted by Alaska Paul  2005-01-19 8:09:20 PM||   2005-01-19 8:09:20 PM|| Front Page Top

#38 Many years ago in Detroit, a truck carrying used dressings from cancer patients who had had radiation treatment crashed.
The headline assured the readers that the thing "failed to explode."
I don't think we can count on the media to help prevent panic.
Look what they do when two inches of snow is predicted.
Posted by Richard Aubrey  2005-01-19 8:16:19 PM||   2005-01-19 8:16:19 PM|| Front Page Top

#39 All is well here. Tom Menino says this is all from "enornymous" sources so we should have nothing to worry about. Looking for four Chinese in a white van so they should be real easy to find.
Posted by tu3031 2005-01-19 8:27:31 PM||   2005-01-19 8:27:31 PM|| Front Page Top

#40 Looking for four Chinese in a white van so they should be real easy to find.

There go all the chinese restaurants and the guy who was going to resurface my hardwood floor...

Posted by Raj 2005-01-19 9:24:33 PM||   2005-01-19 9:24:33 PM|| Front Page Top

#41 http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006185.php
has links to more information.
Also from Drudge Link

and http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=64303

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,144898,00.html
Posted by trailing wife 2005-01-19 9:43:59 PM||   2005-01-19 9:43:59 PM|| Front Page Top

#42 Sorry about screwing with the formatting. I didn't mean to :-(
Posted by trailing wife 2005-01-19 9:44:36 PM||   2005-01-19 9:44:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#43 Anyone know if there are "hot spots" in the southern Colorado Rockies region SW of Colo Springs?
Posted by lex 2005-01-19 9:44:53 PM||   2005-01-19 9:44:53 PM|| Front Page Top

#44 Trailing wife---just use the links command:
[a href=' '] [/a]
except subsitute left and right arrow type symbols. See the buttons or the instructions below the text box on your comment submission box.
Posted by Alaska Paul  2005-01-19 9:52:03 PM||   2005-01-19 9:52:03 PM|| Front Page Top

#45 lex - I know nothing specific about that area - there was no heavy O&G production there when I was writing simulators. General rule of thumb: there are always more problems at lower altitude - running water has passed over and through more rock heading for the ocean, heh. "Static" aquifers are a different matter - local lithology controls the quality. It seems radon gas happens more often at lower altitudes, too, IIRC.

High is good. I like to be first to pass snowmelt, heh, not the 50th...
Posted by .com 2005-01-19 9:53:47 PM||   2005-01-19 9:53:47 PM|| Front Page Top

#46 No guys... all that there is small stuff!
If Kennedy had not signed the non-p treaty.... Project Orion would have put massive US bases on the moon and the planets!
Talk about macho.... Riding a machine-gun blast of atomic bombs into orbit with spaceships the size of a village is no laughing matter.
It would have worked to! Although, enough flights and all of us left on this mud ball would be mutants with cancer.
Orion' Links to the future -- Nuclear Pulse Propulsion

www.projectorion.com

This is a bit safer but not as much fun:
Liftport The Space Elevator Companies
Posted by hmmm 2005-01-19 10:33:25 PM||   2005-01-19 10:33:25 PM|| Front Page Top

#47 Thanks, A. Paul. I'll try it next time. But I am the legendary end user, so I can't guarantee I'll do it right. In the meantime, heartfelt thanks to whoever fixed it!

I've more links for the latest, such as it is, but I'll start a new thread.
Posted by trailing wife 2005-01-19 10:35:36 PM||   2005-01-19 10:35:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#48 This is another worry besides the dirty bomb:
Isomer bombs?
Posted by 3dc 2005-01-19 10:43:35 PM||   2005-01-19 10:43:35 PM|| Front Page Top

#49 Since we are on the subject, check out Nuclear Space.
This was founded by the same group associated with the Orion link mentioned above. It is also the origin of my nic.

During the early 60s, the US was actually running two Moon-landing programs concurrently. The highly-publicized Apollo program used chemical rockets and was designed to put a man on the Moon by 1970. It succeeded and eventually put a dozen people on the Moon at a cost of $40 billion.

Until its cancellation in 1963, Orion was the concurrent program. It aimed to put 150 people and a thousand tons of equipment on the Moon in 1966, at 1/10 of Apollo's cost. The next destination was Mars, to be reached by 1970 with the Moons of Jupiter for the next decade.
The difference was nuclear energy.

Orion would have been the antithesis of the "lightness at any cost" approach to aerospace construction. Weight might actually be an advantage in keeping acceleration to tolerable limits, and a massive steel armor structure was needed to cope with the shock and radiation. By the time of cancellation, the project managers had tentatively selected Electric Boat Company, a submarine builder rather than an aerospace firm, to construct the first Orion in its covered facility at Groton, Conn. The vehicle would have been built on a barge. This would have been launched in the usual manner, then towed to the tentative Orion launch site at Johnston Island in the Pacific.
Even today, if we absolutely, positively had to get a very large load (thousands of tons and hundreds of people) to the Moon or the planets in a reasonable time, and environmental factors were disregarded, Orion would be the way to do it.
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 11:03:59 PM||   2005-01-19 11:03:59 PM|| Front Page Top

#50 An average specimen of granite generates enough heat from radioactive decay to vaporize itself in about 600,000 years if it were perfectly insulated.

Oh no!!! I'm getting irradiated every time I go into or through Yosemite Naitional Park!!!

a!!!!!!
Posted by Bomb-a-rama 2005-01-19 11:07:42 PM||   2005-01-19 11:07:42 PM|| Front Page Top

#51 Well, Bomb, I would recommend wearing a lead suit when you go there, except that lead is more radioactive than granite.

Buwahahahah!
Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2005-01-19 11:21:02 PM||   2005-01-19 11:21:02 PM|| Front Page Top

02:34 trow the jews in the mediteranean sea
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