NEWS DIGEST Evading the radiation sensors
In October, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Yukiya Amano said terrorist groups had developed ways to smuggle uranium undetected past the global network of sensors set up to prevent radiological smuggling – namely, the technology to evade sophisticated monitoring equipment designed to prevent proliferation of radioactive materials. “They have developed a particular container to put enriched uranium in as samples. The groups repeat [deliveries] to defeat the preven- tive measures. This is a real threat.”
And head of international security at
Chatham House, Patricia Lewis, said Mr Amano’s comments appeared to confi rm suspicions that groups had got their hands on devices used by scientists to prevent radioactive emissions in transit, saying: “It is worrying because these containers can get past detectors. We use these devices for security to block isotopes and you can certainly hide highly enriched uranium (HEU) in them. They can certainly get through the detectors.” Mr Amano revealed that the agency had catalogued 2,200 attempts to steal or
…But do dirty bombs matter?
A US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report due out in early 2013 is reported as likely to recommend that contamination from a RDD should not have to be cleaned up as thoroughly as hundreds of existing radioactive sites throughout the US, despite offi cial estimates suggesting such an event would dramatically increase the risk of cancer in people living in the aff ected area. Since the 1980s, clean-up of heavily contaminated proper- ties -- former nuclear weapons manufacturing and testing facilities owned and run by the US Department of Energy (DoE) – has been governed by the US Environmental Protection
New York Army National Guard’s 1156th Engineer Company assist a civilian participant during the extraction phase of a RDD response exercise in November 2011.
©Spc Brian Godette, New York Army National Guard
Agency (EPA) Superfund programme. The argument from DHS centres on the estimate of areas and
people aff ected by a RDD as being far more limited. As EPA guidelines are not applicable to terrorist situations the Super- fund programme is argued as having been developed to deal with contamination that is more limited in scope. According to the DHS report lead S.Y. Chen, senior environmental engineer at Argonne National Laboratory: “You only have so much technol- ogy, manpower, money and supply. Prioritizing clean-up projects will take a lot of eff ort and stakeholder involvement. It’s not going to be a government prescribed approach like we had before.” In reply, University of California nuclear policy lecturer Daniel Hirsch said: “It is just ethically indefensible. Anyone proposing such a thing should go to jail.” He contends that the EPA and anticipated report confuses the issue by addressing RDDs together with INDs, the latter of which would be expected to cause a far greater degree of devastation. “If you have an [improvised nuclear device] you’re going to be missing a portion of your city. If you have a dirty bomb it’s a tiny chemical explosion like a pipe bomb and you’ve got radiation that’s been released over a few blocks.” zy
Remediation is designed assuming that 1 out of 10,000 people exposed to a site for 30 years would be expected to develop cancer in a worst-case scenario. The new DHS report, however, will state these long- standing guidelines do not need to be followed in the event of an attack involving a RDD or improvised nuclear device (IND) and suggests that a radiation dose to the human body of between 100 and 2,000 milli- rems per year be the target guideline for clean-up decisions. However, estimates from the International Commis-
Helping a critical casualty simulator prepare for decontamination during emergency disaster training exercise in downtown Kingston, NY
©Spc. Trisha Pinczes, New York Army National Guard
sion on Radiological Protection, a private, nongovern- mental organization, state that around 1 in 23 people would be expected to develop cancer from receiving a 2,000 millirem dose of radiation per year for 30 years, and around 1 in 466 people would be expected to develop cancer from an annual dose of 100 millirems over the same time period. zy
08 CBNW 2013/01
smuggle uranium since 1995. In May, a Moldovan court convicted three people for illegal traffi cking of refi ned uranium, part of a group attempting exchange of a cylinder containing the radioactive material for cash. The Georgian govern- ment claims it had broken up several smuggling syndicates in 2011; an estimated 700 tons of HEU is stored on Russian military bases. Scientists have used lead-lined boxes for years to transport it but it has long been recog- nised that they could be adapted by smugglers or fall into the wrong hands. zy
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