Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!iuvax!att!cbnews!military From: Bill Johnson (mwj@lanl.gov) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: unconventional terror tactics (Iraq) Summary: Yes, there were two incidents, in Mexico and Brazil. Now can we Message-ID: <1990Oct24.150833.15653@cbnews.att.com> Date: 24 Oct 90 15:08:33 GMT References: <1990Sep27.031917.8257@cbnews.att.com> <1990Oct19.033205.14180@cbnews.att.com> Sender: military-request@att.att.com Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 69 Approved: military@att.att.com From: Bill Johnson (mwj@lanl.gov) In article <1990Oct19.033205.14180@cbnews.att.com>, geoffm@EBay.Sun.COM (Geoff Miller) writes: > In article <1990Oct18.021322.7052@cbnews.att.com> ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Nur Iskandar Taib) writes: > > >Actually, it was worse. The cobalt-60 > >came from a piece of medical irradiation > >equipment sold to a group of Mexican > >doctors. The machine sat around unused > >until sold for scrap. The people at the > >junkyard cut open the cylinder and pel- > >lets of Co-60 were scattered all over > >the place where kids could get at them. > >Some got into the table legs and bars. > > I think that two separate incidents might be confused here. I recall reading > about an incident in Brazil where a piece of medical equipment containing > cobalt ended up in a junkyard, and some of the local kids got into it and > smeared the (powdered) cobalt on their bodies because they liked its pretty > blue glow. This happened in the early Eighties. Well, you're both right -- partially. In the following I speak with a fair bit of professional expertise, but understand that I do *not* speak for Los Alamos National Laboratory; usual institutional disclaimers apply. The Mexican incident did involve a Co-60 source that had been decommissioned as a radiation source at a hospital. It wound up at a junkyard as a result of (I will use some euphemisms from here on ...) "mistakes" by various people, and when a load of junk went off to be melted down and recast into useful iron and steel, the Co-60 went with it. This is how the Co-60 wound up getting worked into rebar, etc. It was discovered purely by a fluke when a truck carrying the radioactive rebar rolled through Los Alamos en route to a town in northwestern New Mexico. The driver got lost and pulled into LAMPF (the medium-energy research facility here) to ask directions. LAMPF, being a particle accelerator, has various kinds of health-physics instrumentation around, including a portal monitor at the entrance (designed by my group, BTW) to check for contamination on vehicles leaving the site. When the truck went through the gate on the way out, it set off this monitor, and good solid detective work did the rest. This happened around 1983. There was indeed a similar Brazilian incident, around 1987 I think, that Miller describes more or less accurately. (Minor quibble: that one involved Cs-137 rather than Co-60.) That incident was more severe in that there were some fatalities from the radiation exposure (no fatalities occurred in the Juarez incident, at least that I'm aware of) and cleaning up the contamination was a fairly serious undertaking, because the radioactive material had been dispersed. (In the Juarez incident, "cleanup" basically involved removing the radioactive rebar from any structures it would have been built into; as the cobalt was in the form of little pellets, as Taib points out, collecting it was not much of a problem.) The relevance of either of these incidents to the use of radwaste by Iraq (or any other potential terrorists...) is pretty low, for several reasons, and I hope that Bill will pronounce this subject dead. For starters, the amount of radioactivity involved in these incidents is *far* lower than would be available for nefarious purposes, which has implications both in scope (for all the hoopla, the number of people exposed in these two cases wasn't very large) and counter measures (all else being equal, the more radiation, the easier it is to detect). I don't think it's appropriate to speculate on how a "bad guy" might use radwaste as a weapon; it certainly isn't appropriate for me to do so, and I'm not going to. I recommend followups on the Juarez and Brazil incidents be directed to sci.physics (where they have been discussed before) and that the subject be allowed to die out in sci.military. Bill Johnson | "A man should never be ashamed to own he Los Alamos National Laboratory | has been in the wrong, which is but saying, Los Alamos, New Mexico USA | in other words, that he is wiser to-day !cmcl2!lanl!mwj (mwj@lanl.gov) | than he was yesterday." (A. Pope)