Posted on 06/23/2002 4:04:29 PM PDT by Prodigal Son
Large boxes of powdered caesium 137, a powerfully radioactive substance, are lost in the former Soviet Union. In the hands of terrorists, just one would provide enough "dirty bomb" material to badly contaminate large urban areas, forcing their evacuation and possibly their abandonment.
These caesium sources are a major reason why the US has committed at least $25 million in 2002 to an urgent effort to track lost radioactive sources in former Soviet states, as New Scientist reported on Thursday.
Media reports that the caesium was originally spread on fields in secret Soviet agricultural experiments are wrong, says Melissa Fleming,spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, which is helping to coordinate the recovery drive. That would have given rise to vast tracts of contaminated farmland, and probably considerable human exposure.
But the truth may be worse. The ceasium was in fact enclosed within shielded boxes, and used as a source of gamma rays to irradiate grain, to keep it from germinating in storage, says Abel Gonzales, director of radiation and waste safety at the IAEA. The gamma rays were also used to induce mutations in seeds, a common method for generating improved crop varieties.
Very lucrative
But because the caesium was used entirely as a source of radiation, it remained enclosed within the mobile gamma sources. Hence it is all still there, and with a half-life of 32 years, much of it is still very radioactive.
The project, named "Kolos" after the Russian for an ear of corn, was large. "We have no idea how many of these sources there are," says Gonzales.
That is bad, because each of them contained 3500 Curies of caesium. "That is very, very big," says Gonzales. By comparison, a caesium source lost from a hospital in Goiania, Brazil in 1987, which killed four immediately and exposed dozens more to heavy doses of radiation held only a few hundred Curies.
Unlike the solid Strontium-90 in lost nuclear power sources that have been the subject of recent searches in the former Soviet Union, Project Kolos's caesium was powdered, so in theory it would be easy to pack into a "dirty bomb" - or several. These bombs use conventional explosive to scatter radioactive material.
The sources were housed on trucks. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, the trucks have been diverted, so their potentially very lucrative cargoes could be anywhere, experts fear. US participants in the joint Russian-US-IAEA drive to recover the sources say there will be experts in the field in the next few weeks looking for clues.
Put one of these inside a cargo container, ship a couple of containers into twenty or so major U.S. harbors and voila! Something truly horrifying.
But, hey, Al Qaeda could easily do a similiar action using Indian I variola, a virulent smallpox virus the Russians used in their bioweapons program.
Either scenario would likely kill many, many of our citizens.
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