Surviving a SHFT Scenario from a Dirty Bomb.

[U.S.SFC_RET]

We were attacked on September 11 2001 by Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network. He was backed by the Taliban regime. We are at war with these terrorists. The War on terrorism will not end in my lifetime and if you are reading this it probably won't end in your lifetime either. It took Osama Bin Laden over five years to plan and to execute the disaster of the twin towers. you would have known this if you have watched the CNN documentary on Osama Bin Laden. I know what CNN is. I know that they are the Cornerstone for liberal driven news media but they did put together one heck of an eye opener of a documentary. It is not a matter of IF there is going to be a dirty bomb deployed in a city somewhere in our Country but WHEN. If I have any gut feeling about these bastards it won't be one dirty bomb, it will probably be several if not more. There are several types of radiation when it comes to a nuclear explosion.
1. Gamma rays is the most dangerous. Won't happen with a dirty bomb if they cannot achieve fisson or fusion with any type of nuclear weapon warhead devices.
2. Beta radiation, radioactive fallout. After a dirty bomb goes off and you are not affected by the direct explosion stay indoors and seal off entry ways, windows, doors and chimneys.
3. Alpha particles, Alpha particles are bigger than beta particles and are treated the same way as beta radiation.
4. Always stay covered until the civilian authorities tell you it's safe to go outside.
5. If you have to go outside wear long sleeve clothing and wear the highest quality respirator NIOSH HEPA PARTICULATE type where you change the filters easily. Spend some money on these things because they work. Check them out by placing them on over your head and use a strong scent like a skunk scent. If a skunk scent won't go through neither will beta radiation!
6. Stock up on plenty of non perishable food and water to last at least a month and the reason why I recommend a month is if your area gets hit with a dirty bomb you will face anarchy.
Do not eat any food exposed to radiation. Do not drink any water exposed to radiation. Best advice I can really give is to do your homework now.
I am nowhere near anykind of an expert with dirty bombs but I do know a little about Nuclear Chemical and Biological Defence and Warfare in the Army.
Get a good AR15 and learn to shoot it well and stock pile high quality U.S. Made ammunition or comparable in a dry safe place. Teach your spouse and children if they are old enough to shoot how to safely and efficiently fire a weapon. A man who desires to protect his property and who is a confident marksman with one of these can be an intimidating force to recon with.

 

[Perfesser]

Didn't watch the Bin Laden documentary on CNN, but Glenn Beck is really doing a good job TRYING to warn the USA about Iran, almost every night...but no one's paying attention.

 

[NukemJim]

Uhmm.. I have a few questions about some of these points

Gamma rays is the most dangerous

Are you talking inside the human body or outside? Inside the human body Beta or Alpha are more dangerous they have higher LETs and RBEs.

Gamma rays is the most dangerous Won't happen with a dirty bomb if they cannot achieve fisson or fusion with any type of nuclear weapon warhead devices.

A "Dirty Bomb" currently refers to a conventional explosive that spreads radioactive material around. No fission or fusion takes place. Older works sometimes described some fission and or fusion devices as being either "clean" meaning there would be "minimal" fallout or "dirty" meaning that there would be more fallout (some warhead use fission only, some use fission then fusion, some use fission then fusion then fission again). A lot depends on where the bomb is detonated. Gamma rays will happen with a dirty bomb if the radionuclide used gives off Gamma.

Beta radiation, radioactive fallout

Radioactive fallout from a fission or fussion device will have Gamma, Beta, and Alpha radiation. Fallout comes not only from the fissionable material but also from non radiactive materials that were transmutted by the Neutron Flux from the detonation of the warhead.

Alpha particles, Alpha particles are bigger than beta particles and are treated the same way as beta radiation.

Alpha particles are "bigger" than Beta particles true but while an Alpha particle can be stopped by a newspaper or layers of dead skin Beta requires more shielding. Alphas outside the human body are almost harmless, inside the human body they are the most damaging. If you try to shield Beta particles with lead you can create X-rays from the interaction of the Beta particles with the lead, that does not happen with Alpha.

If a skunk scent won't go through neither will beta radiation!

I do not know on this one could you please cite a reference.

Do not eat any food exposed to radiation

If the food is in a sealed container (can, MRE pouch, Plastic bag) just wash the outside off and eat. Many foods can be preserved by irradiation, exposure to radiation (as opposed to radioactive contamination) does not spoil food at the levels we are talking about.

I am nowhere near anykind of an expert with dirty bombs

I definetly agree with you on this one.

Hso or anyone else with RSO training please jump in on this one please!

From my limited readings on "Dirty Bombs" they are a weapon of "Mass Dissruption" and pose little radiological threat unless you are injured by the initial blast or go into the blast area as a rescuer.

NukemJim

 

[Geronimo45]

From what I've heard/read, the dangers of dirty bombs are greatly exaggerated. What scares people is 'radiation'. The garden-variety Palestinian bomb - explosives and some nails - and other general shrapnel - on the outside. That kind of bomb beats the dirty bomb in the easy ability to make. Once you've got the explosives, nails are easy. Nuclear material is a lot harder to come by.

 

[Technosavant]

Nuclear material is a lot harder to come by.

Not necessarily. Plutonium and Uranium, yes. Other radioactive materials, not at all. Chemotherapy drugs. Smoke detectors (some parts therein). There's a bunch of places a terrorist could get his hands on something radioactive.

Still, though, dirty bombs are overrated. Good for inducing terror in densely populated areas. Pretty bad for anything else- set one off downtown, and you can shut down a few city blocks. Some people might get slightly sick, others might have an increased cancer risk, but unless the blast itself killed people, it wouldn't have done enough to turn things into a SHTF situation.

I lose more sleep over the possibility of my laptop battery going nova than over the possibility of a dirty bomb. Even when my new battery arrives, I still don't expect to see dirty bombs rise a notch. Dirty diapers are more frightening.

 

[hso]

I'll make a couple of controversial points and then ask the mods to kill this thread.

First my background. I am a physicist. I work in Oak Ridge. I'm involved with contamination investigations and remediation activities. I've been responsible for safety and radiation protection for some of the biggest Dept. of Energy cleanups in the eastern U.S. I've been dealing with these issues professionally for decades.

There's so much wrong with this thread that it's almost impossible to fix and so much particularly technically wrong with the first post that it would take a great deal of time just to correct. The best thing about the first post is that it warns you to keep the rad poop off of you and out of you to protect yourself. Please replace "radiation" with "radioactive contamination" when referring to water/food. Anything in containers will be safe once cleaned off. Also, after a week of mass evacuation you won't be in the contaminated area to worry about what happened there.

Nukemjim is pretty much accurate in everything he's posted here.
So is Geranimo45.
TS is correct with his second paragraph, but cracking open a bunch of barely regulated smoke detectors for their tiny radioactive sources is like collecting the powder from cap gun reels to make a bomb; possible, but certainly not practicable, unless you've got an infinite number of monkeys working away at it.

There have been numerous radioactive materials releases over the past 50 years that have resulted in overexposures and over 100 deaths. The “worst” cases involved radiography sources lost/stolen and left or cracked open and spread around homes and neighborhoods. Much like the results of a so-called “dirty bomb” event. Few people outside of my professional community have ever heard of them. The victims were buried or treated and the sites cleaned up.

The fundamental difference between those accidents and a “dirty bomb” is their intent and extent. The accidents were addressed and cleaned up with the intent to prevent panic. The extent of the accident was usually limited to a single location, but some involved whole neighborhoods. The “dirty bomb” is intended to create panic and would be placed in a symbolic site instead of the simple neighborhoods the accident occurred in. It's intended to be spread over acres. In spite of this, deaths from a dirty bomb, long term and prompt, would be trivial measured against the population of the U.S. should they occur and their real impact is based on fear due to ignorance of the nature of radiation.

More later.


http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/radaccidents.html (very good)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents (not bad, but it's Wiki after all)

 

[ctdonath]

Agreed. The lead premise confuses two rather different devices.

Nuclear bomb: enough hard-to-make radioactive material is compressed long enough to cause an explosive chain reaction. Lots of damage (kinda like MOAB), lots of high-energy radiation, lots of short-half-life materials created which spew more radiation. Fallout, radiation sickness, etc. kill about as many as the initial blast. Don't be downwind for a few hundred miles.

Dirty bomb: relatively long-half-life stuff packed around a normal bomb which spews it across an area, kinda like packing nails around a stick of dynamite. It's mostly just messy: the area (maybe a few acres at most) are cordoned off, and most of the damage is media-fueled hysteria. Drive a mile and you'll be fine.

The only way a "dirty bomb" would lead to SHTF is if synchronized media & government used the opportunity to whip up hysteria as a premise to impose martial law - which couldn't last long, once people realized there wasn't a problem. The problem is psychology, not physics.

 

[U.S.SFC_RET]

NUKEMJIM I totally understand your point.
Gamma radiation wouldn't be a product of dirty bombs. I posted the three types of radiation on the thread to "try to differentiate" the three." These are what we were trained by in the Army. Beta particles again you are right beta particles can go through material. The question I have for you is what type of radiation can be scattered by a dirty bomb? We know the intent and that intent is to spread panic. Makes for a SHTF if you ask me.
My intent was to make aware the potential threat of dirty bombs and in my opinion it is not a matter of if, it is more likely a matter of when. The more informed you are the less likely that you are going to panic because you have planned well in advance.

 

[critter]

The problem is psychology, not physics.

IMHO, you have hit the nail squarely on the head with that statement. If the general population of a major city were to hear that the "POP" they heard was a (HORROR) DIRTY BOMB, more people would be stomped to death and die in the mad rush traffic to exit the place than would EVER be harmed by the relatively small amounts of radiation spread around by the most likely types of dirty bombs.

THEREFORE, I feel that the dirty bomb is the PERFECT weapon for the terrorists. Look at how they have recently screwed up air travel WITHOUT ACTUALLY HAVING DONE ANYTHING other than amp up the sheeple into a frenzy.

THE TERRORISTS ARE WINNING as they can jerk our chains to no end with only the threat of some such thing taking place.

 

[strambo]

It does my heart good that the consensus and experts are comfirming what little I know about "dirty bombs". Not a big deal...except the panic that comes after. The government needs to sponsor a big special on dirty bombs to dispell the myths and inform people. Be proactive and make a short instructional program ahead of time and distribute it to the media to play right after an event too.

A dirty bomb is like a regular bomb, plus a few extra people get sick and you can't go in the immediate area again for quite some time.

 

[dragongoddess]

A dirty bomb can be cleaned up. Radiation danger is small. You just need time for cleanup which means putting stuff in trucks and taking it to the landfill. After that its business as usual.

 

[NukemJim]

The question I have for you is what type of radiation can be scattered by a dirty bomb?

A "Dirty Bomb" (meaning conventional explosives that are surrounded by radionuclides with the intent of spreading the radionuclides) will have whatever type of radiation the radionuclides give off. The emmission of the nuclides will not be changed by the explosives. Whatever the radiation the radionuclide was giving off prior to the explosion will be given off after the explosion.

Could be Alpha, Beta or Gamma or any combination thereof.

NukemJim

 

[Heckler]

HSO

I'd like your perspective on this. I heard a (so-called)nuke expert describe a scenario that he felt was more likely to happen than an actual nuclear bomb.

Terrorists get their hands on some U-235. They grind it into a powder. They package it around conventional exposives. They fly it over a major metro area like L.A. or New York city, or over D.C. in a small plane. They detonate it at altitude and let the blast and wind scatter the U-235 over the city and settle down on everything. He claimed that though nothing would be destroyed the entire area would be turned into a death zone for 60 years.

True? Plausible threat?

 

[Odd Job]

A few years ago I attended a conference on biological, chemical and radiological weapons here in London. Dr Keith Edsall gave us a brilliant talk on the use of radioactive materials in explosive devices, and also used without explosives. Some of the key points of his talk were:

1) The hazards associated with 'dirty bombs' are exaggerated by the media. In reality the hazard posed by any radioactive fragments at the scene is diminished by distance (the Inverse Square law)

2) Those who are covered in debris or dust that may contain radioactive particles should have their clothes removed and be washed down, preferably not standing erect, but either bent over or lying down, because it doesn't make sense to wash this dust out of your hair and let it travel down the length of your body before going into the drain.

3) Radioactive 'sources' are quite easy to get hold of in certain countries. I'll not list how these are obtained, or what the ideal manner of collection is, but it is quite scary in some cases to see how easy it would be to get hold of a radioactive source.

Lastly he told us that for the purposes of terror it would be far more effective to not have the material placed in a dirty bomb, but instead keep it in small quantities and distribute it manually. That would be far worse: to cause the random silent exposure of some of the population and only a week later, say, make an announcement that radioactive sources have been deployed.

Various accidents were discussed, where sources had been misplaced, stolen or simply lost and subsequently picked up by unsuspecting individuals. In these quantities (solid metals of about the size of a golf ball) the biological effects were simply awful. It is sources like that which I fear, more than the 'dirty bomb.'

 

[hso]

I think we've got a good grasp on this now.

The terrorism value of a "dirty bomb" is in the mass panic it would cause and not the actual harm from exposure to the radioactive material. People would trample each other to get away from the boogy man of radiation. Pity since it's terribly easy to deal with the relatively small hazard such a terror weapon actualy represents.

Mass evacuation followed by simple personnel decontamination protocols (cool showers with lots of soap) would minimize the exposure damage from external contamination. Another advantage is that the most damaging radiation type that might be given off by the radioactive material the bomb spread over a small area, Alpha, is the least penetrating and won't even penetrate the dead skin layer of a baby and can be blocked with a sheet of notebook paper, while Gamma, the deepest penetrating, is the least damaging form of ionizing radiation that might be given off. Damage from internal contamination, inhaled or ingested, would depend upon what type of radiation the contamination would be emitting (Alpha= not good, gamma=not much) and how long the material stayed in the body before it was excreted. Alpha would be worse in this case since once it's inside the body it's potential for damage is greater than the other types. (remember it's the most damaging)

Of course the potential for inhaling the material would be very low in the first place considering that it would not be in a readily respirable form (radioactive "gravel" can't be inhaled into the lungs, ya know ) since the radioactive materials they'd have to steal wouldn't be in a readily respirable form in the first place. Putting it into a readily respirable form isn't practicle anyway for terrorists since they'd have to have a lot of equipment to turn it into small respirable dust particles, capture all the dust and avoid setting off the endless numbers of detectors around the U.S.

Let me remind everyone that it is estimated that there was only a total of 16,000 deaths due to radiation exposure from the atomic bombs that destroyed the cities of Hirsoshima and Nagasaki. Cancer deaths are estimated to have totaled less than 450 people combined. Those were real nuclear weapons exposing people over 2 kilometers away from "ground zero" and not a package of explosives with some radioactive material wrapped aroung it ("dirty bomb") that might spread chunks of radioactive material over a couple of blocks.

 

[hso]

He claimed that though nothing would be destroyed the entire area would be turned into a death zone for 60 years.


True? Plausible threat?

No

He might have just as well said, "First a miracle happens. Then another" as having said,

Terrorists get their hands on some U-235. They grind it into a powder

Hiroshima had a uranium 235 bomb dropped on it. Seemed to not be a dead zone for 60 years afterward.

 

[benEzra]

1. Gamma rays is the most dangerous. Won't happen with a dirty bomb if they cannot achieve fisson or fusion with any type of nuclear weapon warhead devices.

A dirty bomb using cobalt-60 would spread around a gamma emitter. The "dirty bomb" is just a means of spreading a radionuclide, but the class of radiation is determined by the identity of said radionuclide.

Terrorists get their hands on some U-235. They grind it into a powder. They package it around conventional exposives. They fly it over a major metro area like L.A. or New York city, or over D.C. in a small plane. They detonate it at altitude and let the blast and wind scatter the U-235 over the city and settle down on everything. He claimed that though nothing would be destroyed the entire area would be turned into a death zone for 60 years.

True? Plausible threat?

Not a plausible threat, IMHO. U-235 is not all that radioactive, because its half-life is something like 711 million years. That means that if you had a pound of U-235, it would take 711 million years for half of it to undergo radioactive decay.

The shorter the half-life of a substance, the more radioactive it is. Simplistically speaking, 1 gazillion atoms of an alpha/gamma emitter with a half-life of 1 hour will produce 0.5 gazillion gamma ray photons and alpha particles in an hour (counting only the initial decay). 1 gazillion atoms of U-235 will produce 0.00000000000016 gazillion gamma ray photons and alpha particles in an hour; it would take 711 million years for U-235 to produce as much radiation as substance A would produce in an hour.

The reason fallout from fission bombs is SO radioactive is that a lot of the radionuclides produced in the initial chain reaction and its neutron flux have half-lives measured in minutes or hours, not millions of years. That's also why the fallout becomes so much less dangerous so quickly.

FWIW, there are probably thousands of pounds of (naturally occurring) U-235 already in the soil in your city, and millions of pounds of the more common U-238 isotope. So if they dispersed a few pounds of U-235 over a wide area, you'd never notice the radiation over the normal background.

If they had a few pounds of U-235, I'd be a LOT more worried about them making a crude gun-type fission bomb. The spontaneous fission rate of U-235 is low enough that you could almost hand-assemble a U-235 core and have it not fizzle, producing a fairly high-order explosion, so it doesn't take scientists and engineers to make a U-235 bomb. Fortunately, it's almost impossible to get hold of enriched U-235, and a plutonium bomb is a LOT more difficult for a non-state actor to produce than a U-235 bomb.

 

[cassandrasdaddy]

nuke plant

they held a meeting down here and aknowledged that a big modern jet flown into our plant would exceed design parameters great to know not so great of them to announce it

 

[hso]

Here's a good basic Rad Worker course that folks can read to improve their understanding of radiation and radioactive matrials.

http://www.keele.ac.uk/admin/hr/ohsu/rad/