'Dirty bomb' rings false alarm
2004-01-08 10:28
Washington - Two days before New Year's Eve, US Energy Department nuclear experts detected radiation coming from a storage rental building in Las Vegas. The White House was called. FBI agents secured the site.
Scientists sent a robot into the building, and it retrieved a duffel bag with a stainless steel capsule of radium used for treating cancer. The homeless man who provided them with a key to the storage site said he'd found the capsule a few years earlier. Officials breathed easier.
Government nuclear experts last month began working undercover in major US cities, using high-tech equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags, to hunt for radiological "dirty" bombs and other weapons terrorists might use, according to three government officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. So far, the Las Vegas incident is the only one in which any worrisome levels of radiation were found, said one official.
The energy department's nuclear incident response teams were sent to scour Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington immediately after the nation's terror alert status was upgraded on December 21 to orange, or high risk.
The teams took readings ahead of New Year's celebrations at New York's Times Square and the Las Vegas strip, and for the Rose Bowl Parade on New Year's Day in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena.
Among the tools the experts might use is a Palm Pilot with a cadmium-zinc-telluride crystal that can detect radiation, and a handheld advanced nucleic acid analyser, about the size of a video game, that can identify pathogens based on their DNA within 15 minutes.
David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said sending these teams of Energy Department experts to cities for unspecified threats represents a new mission.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, a dirty bomb would not ignite an atomic chain reaction and would not require highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are normally heavily guarded and hard to obtain. The materials could be a lower-grade isotope, like those used in medicine or research.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it receives an average of 300 reports a year of small amounts of radioactive materials missing from various users, but has no evidence that anyone is systematically collecting it to use in a dirty bomb.
About 50 soil-testing gauges used for construction and road-building that contain small amounts of highly radioactive Cesium-137 and Americium-241 are reported stolen each year, and many are never recovered, the NRC has said. A dirty bomb could be made from the radioactive material, though it would take hundreds of the gauges to supply enough.
Commission spokesperson Dave MacIntyre said there is no evidence the thefts are co-ordinated.
- SAPA