Nuclear Radiation Alert: Could You Have A Dirty Bomb Next Door?
/By Arnie Gundersen
Many years ago, I woke up on a Sunday morning to find three State Police Bomb Squad cars and one truck pulling a bomb disposal trailer parked on the lot next door to our home in rural Connecticut. The heavily wooded lot next door did not have a house on it, only a small shed at that back end that the owner was using as he began to clear the lot in order to build on it. To make a long story short, it turned out that the teenager, who's dad owned the property next door, built a dozen live pipe bombs in that shed at the back of the property. Luckily for Maggie, our young son, and me, none of those pipe bombs exploded while he was out there making them!
Twenty-five years ago, a few years after the pipe bomb incident we experienced, 168 Federal employees and family members were murdered in Oklahoma City by anti-government militant Tim McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols. These two men filled a U-Haul truck with a fertilizer bomb and detonated it at the Oklahoma City government center. The Oklahoma City bombing was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil until the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks.
Unfortunately, my takeaway from these events and other small explosive events all over the United States is that it is relatively easy for a lone-wolf militant or several militia-type American citizens to build and detonate explosive devices in populated areas.
Now imagine if someone laced those same devices with radioactive isotopes! When a detonation device explodes and releases radioactivity, it is known as a 'dirty bomb'. It is not like a nuclear bomb that creates radioactivity from its atomic chain reaction and its ensuing explosions, like the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or all the atomic bombs tested over the Pacific Ocean or rural areas of the western United States. Instead, a dirty bomb is a traditional explosive device laced with radioactivity obtained elsewhere, usually stolen.
Depending upon the explosives used, a dirty bomb may destroy a single building or many buildings when it explodes. However, the real damage is from its release of radioactive material. When a dirty bomb explodes, the radioactivity moves outward, landing on the surrounding area, the first responders, civilians, adjoining buildings, streets, and cars that are blocks away. The microparticles of radioactivity that cannot be seen or smelled, and usually not tasted, travel on the wind and weather as it blows through the area.
In theory, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) carefully monitors all radioactive material allegedly controlled at manufacturing facilities, power plants, hospitals, testing labs, and nuclear research labs.
Last week, I found myself rudely awakened from my belief that the NRC, the federal regulatory agency that controls most commercial nuclear facilities, really had control of our nation's nuclear materials. I was shocked when I learned that officials in Pennsylvania had uncovered two empty houses loaded with radioactive materials that did not belong to the people who had lived there and for which no protections for individuals or the nearby community had ever been in place.
The homeowners had died, and their houses were being prepared for auction when workers uncovered the toxic radioactivity. Forty-five containers filled with radioactive material, including Radium-226 and Strontium-90 previously stolen from a radioactive Superfund site, were discovered at these two adjoining homes. We have looked at media everywhere since the NRC issued the Event Notification Report #54936 detailing this chilling discovery. It appears that thus far, there has been no press coverage at all.
According to the NRC Event Notification Report:
"On Sunday afternoon, September 28, 2020, the Department was notified of radioactive material found in a private residence being cleaned-out for an auction sale. BRP staff responded and found several sealed radium-226 sources and small quantities of uranium ore. The initial investigation revealed an additional nearby property also had radioactive material present. Staff inspected that property as well and discovered several more items. Owners of the houses were related and have passed away. HazMat responder's shoes and gloves were surveyed on September 28, with no removable contamination noted. Ambient dose rates were in the microrem to few millirem per hour range around the sources. The houses were secured that evening and further investigation continued through the week. As of October 7, 45 items have been collected. Note, some items contain multiple exempt sources, pieces of rock, or bottles of circa 1920 quack medical tablets with radium-226. These items include: old quack radium consumer products, exempt check sources, vacuum tubes, a military compass, luminous tubes and deck markers, cans of thorium oxide, and various other items containing radium-226, thorium-232, strontium-90, carbon-14, and natural uranium in quantities ranging from less than a microcurie [sic] to a few millicuries [sic] (in the case of two radium-226 sources). An empty 5 gallon pail with 'U.S. Radium, Bloomsburg PA' stenciled on the side was found. It is believed this old manufacturer of radium products, and now an EPA Superfund site, is where these items originated from. No exposure to members of the public above the public dose limit of 100 mrem per year are believed to have occurred during discovery and recovery, as the higher activity sources were within lead containers when found. BRP will update this event if more information becomes available. A complete inventory and activity calculations are underway for proper disposal."
Sources that are "Less than IAEA Category 3 sources," are either sources that are very unlikely to cause permanent injury to individuals or contain a very small amount of radioactive material that would not cause any permanent injury. Some of these sources, such as moisture density gauges or thickness gauges that are Category 4, the amount of unshielded radioactive material, if not safely managed or securely protected, could possibly - although it is unlikely - temporarily injure someone who handled it or were otherwise in contact with it, or who were close to it for a period of many weeks. For additional information go here. [Emphasis Added]
Let's put the Radium and Strontium that made up this radioactive discovery in perspective. According to the NRC, only a "few millicuries" of radioactivity were present. A millicurie sounds like a small amount of radioactivity, but it is not. Quite simply, it is a measure of the number of radioactive bullets emitted by the radioactive material. A single millicurie of radium-226 glows in the dark and emits at least 37,000,000 dangerous alpha particles every second. Radium-226 lingers in the environment for 16,000 years, with a half-life of 1600 years, meaning that 1600 years from now, it will still be emitting 17,000,000 radioactive bullets every second!
Did you ever hear about the true story of the Radium Girls? These poor young women, who worked for a company using radium in manufacturing, became seriously ill with disfiguring radiation poisoning. Their story is about worker safety. These young women actually glowed in the dark at night, and their corpses will glow in the dark for millennia. All the women were relatively young, and all became very sick before dying painful deaths. You can now watch a movie that details the harrowing story of these young women.
The Strontium-90 (Sr90) found at this site is called a bone seeker, which means that if inhaled or ingested, it is absorbed in peoples' bones just like calcium is. Sr90 is known to cause leukemia. In the environment, Strontium-90 lingers for as long as 300 years and emits beta particles with an energy of 500,000 electron volts.
There are so many questions that the NRC and the local officials need to answer to investigate this incident. Will we learn the truth, or will it all be swept under the NRC rug and associated agencies in this investigation?
For example:
How were 45 containers of radioactive material stolen, and when?
Who stole the 45 containers, and for what purpose?
Was anyone in the public overexposed, and for how many years?
How did the owners of the two houses die?
For what purpose would someone take these highly radioactive isotopes?
Are there more materials out there from the same site?
And, when will the public be informed?
It appears that no one knew that a lot of radioactive material was even missing, and luckily it has now been recovered. The two houses contained hazardous types of radiation (Ra226 and Sr90). In the wrong hands, this material would easily have made a very horrible dirty bomb. Uncovering this hazard was a lucky discovery.
Let's think again about the Oklahoma Bombing. According to the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), "the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 was the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in U.S. history, resulting in the deaths of 168 people. In a matter of seconds, the blast destroyed most of the nine-story building, incinerated nearby vehicles, and damaged or destroyed more than 300 other buildings."
To quote Pippin, "It is smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart!" We were lucky this time. Piles of radioactivity lie in many places all over the country, and most disturbingly, it is not well-monitored. Most of all, during the last four years, the current administration has continued to relax NRC and EPA regulations that protect our communities, our neighborhoods, and workers from such unyielding hazards. We must stop looking away and work together to protect all Americans from the radioactive dangers located in almost every state in the country. Radioactivity is not a little spill that can be easily dug up and contained. Quite simply, it contaminates everything around it and migrates in microparticles of dust and dirt.
What is in the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the food you eat?
Fairewinds will keep you informed…
