Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Congressional red team discovers that it's (still) trivial to acquire all the materials for a dirty nuke

mayko - 5-8-2016 at 10:50

Trouble sourcing materials for your Radiochemistry experiments? You're not trying hard enough, clearly!
Quote:

The team used fake names to incorporate an LLC that they used to rent an empty storefront in Texas, then applied for a license to acquire and store nuclear material. The license inspector -- a Texas official, operating under authority delegated by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- bought their story that they would buy and install all the necessary safety equipment once they had their license, and he handed them a license on the spot.

The license entitled them to acquire small amounts of Class C nuclear material, considered to be relatively safe in small amounts. They used a scanner and an image-editing program to alter the quantities of material on the license and proceeded to acquire sufficient material to create a dirty bomb. Their report noted that the lack of any verification step for Class C material licenses meant that they could have duplicated their licenses, altered quantities, and acquired arbitrarily large amounts of nuclear material.

On the positive side, dirty nukes aren't particularly lethal. The major damage they do is infrastructural: nuking the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach could trigger a $250B cleanup and lots of public unrest.


https://boingboing.net/2016/08/05/congressional-red-team-dis...

careysub - 5-8-2016 at 15:00

Quote: Originally posted by mayko  
Trouble sourcing materials for your Radiochemistry experiments? You're not trying hard enough, clearly!


Quote:

... The license entitled them to acquire small amounts of Class C nuclear material, considered to be relatively safe in small amounts. They used a scanner and an image-editing program to alter the quantities of material on the license and proceeded to acquire sufficient material to create a dirty bomb....


https://boingboing.net/2016/08/05/congressional-red-team-dis...


Of course this report does not contain enough information to determine what they actually did. How much of what material did they actually get?

"Class C nuclear material" is presumable Class C waste, which has a maximum activity of 7 curies per cubic foot. 20 curies was the source amount in the Goiânia, Brazil accident; 1000 curies is the posited amount in the report on "dirty bombs" below.

Starting my renting a storefront already puts this acquisition strategy beyond the means and interest of most of us, and we don't how large the "small amounts" allowed the license actually were. The step were they forge a Federal license is not something that is recommended.

Attachment: R41890.pdf (1.8MB)
This file has been downloaded 420 times

mayko - 5-8-2016 at 15:23

That's a neat report; thanks! Yes, I would not suggest following in these footsteps. . There's a reason this isn't in Reagents and Apparatus Acquisition. xD

'Trivial' is definitely an understatement...

James Ikanov - 27-8-2016 at 23:52

I had some hypothetical interest in this and it's still my opinion that the best way to acquire materials such as this is..... erm, well.....


You'd need to get yourself a lot of deuterium, a really large box of solar panels, and neighbours that don't ask questions. And a shit ton of lead. And piping, some pressure vessels, a welder, a good bit of odds and ends....

Thorium as a leaping off point makes things a bit easier but it's still not exactly a walk in the park after that. And there are still plenty of uranium mines out there in the wide world that are mostly unguarded. And united nuclear (IIRC at least) still has enough unproccessed pitchblend to work with that it's doable. Not readily, but in theory, with about $750K, you could make a nuke. Maybe a bit less.

And that assumes you're flying solo, mostly using the internet as a guide.

XeonTheMGPony - 28-8-2016 at 05:23

All these laws where never for your safety or others for that matter, it has been merely the consolidation of power for the ones who wish to keep it whether the rest consent or not.

If we where the least concerned about health and safety cigarettes would been banned long ago one far far more control would be applied to alcohol, and to get a drivers license would require far more knowledge then they do!

Here I can get all I need to make some thing very nasty from 3 spots, a health food store, the hard ware store and the local safety store

Ignorance is the hall mark of the sheeple, and that allows the corrupt and power hungry to flourish. And it is we who can think that are punished by those who are too dumb too by virtue of politics.