Dr. James Conca's talk on Dirty Bombs. Going to throw a few quotes from the transcript out here...
The real weapon in a dirty bomb is public panic, and the best defense is a rational rapid response.
It has to be fast and it has to be rational and it can't include fear mongering and Linear No Threshold (LNT) dose kind of thinking.
The response must not be similar to superfund cleanup which takes years, but must be rapid and immediate, days, or the attack will have been a complete success.
Dirty bombs are self-limiting in the sense that the more dispersed it is the the less the dose so there's there's kind of a critical point at which the dispersal makes the diry bomb not very effective in terms of effect, but it's actually the fear that matters.
A bomb wakes everyone up. If you just drizzle it out the back of a crop duster no one's even going to know what happens as Sig Hecker quoted they're Weapons of Mass Disruption that cause panic disproportionate to the actual danger.
The whole point is to contaminate vital infrastructure and trigger large economic consequences.
Every day that lower Manhattan is shut down cost about $60 million so if you actually detonate an effective dirty bomb in downtown Manhattan and everyone freaks out and no one's goes to work or anything you know for a and it takes a year to clean up then there's your half a trillion cost and that's that would be considered a huge success by a perpetrator.
Most likely the first dirty bomb attack will be against a US military base overseas, because it's easy to move stuff around outside the United States, very difficult to move it around inside the United States.
The threat's real. There are several credible designs and plans that have been found in records.
Two actual dirty bombs were deployed by Chetan separatists against Russia. One was foiled, and one failed.
Then there's these 38 Alazan shoulder fired rockets Caesium-137 tips. It's kind of interesting now, according to Homeland Security, they thought they weren't real. But according to a Moldova Minister who I talked with, he said yeah, it was real, and the Russians came in and took him away.
Suicide bombers are not deterred by the risk of death so handling a large radioactive source dose isn't really a deterrent.
In the old days we would say a they'll kill themselves well they won't kill themselves right away they have plenty of time to actually put this thing together before they die.
Sources like Cobalt-60, Cesium-137, Strontium-90 are relatively easy to obtain in large amounts from industry because they're industrial materials and security issues related to radioactive materials are focused on special nuclear materials used to produce nuclear weapons.
So the Cobalt and Cesium kind of slip through through the cracks because they're not special nuclear materials and they're not covered by many of the nonproliferation treaties and strategies, although we are getting better at it.
This is the dirty bomb material of choice is overwhelmingly Cesium-137 chloride powder because it's very dispersible it's a hard gamma.
Chemically and and physically it behaves like potassium chloride salt substitute, and it's wonderfully dispersible, that's the issue.
So say you use a 1000 lb ANFO carbomb. As soon as the bomb explodes plume of entrained radioactive particles and soot is created that begins to spread out from the point source. Size and speed depending strongly upon blast configuration, weather conditions and urban canyon effects in metropolitan and the speed and size depending strongly upon the blast configuration, the weather conditions and the urban canyon effects of those areas.
So look at the top right you have a time scale wind direction, from the lower right to the upper left. So the bomb explodes and then you get this small entrained plume right here. And then this is the urban canyon effect. So at first it spreads down the urban canyons delineated by large buildings. And in a metropolitan area they're, dominated by large buildings. Then, you know, about 10 minutes later, after that, you get a very small plume that's lofted high and goes very far.
The first thing you do is delineate the zones of radiation.
So you have ground zero then you you you want to find the one REM per hour line, and then the 0.1 REM per hour and then the 2 mill per hour because that's the zone that the first responders have to deal with.
You need to know those zones so you can restrict the time you're in those zones if you're responding to this.
So who makes the decisions on when to call in secondary, terti responders like the DOE rap teams or the National Guard civil support teams?
You know, who calls those in who advises sheltering in place while you're dealing with this?
Who advises to evacuate the area?
Who calls for a massive wash down of the affected area by fire hydrant water?
Who declares the initial response over?
Well, that is The Incident Commander and it's going to be a local incident commander even though by law the FBI is The Incident Commander on dirty bombs. However, they [FBI] don't want anything to do with rad. They don't know anything about it. They don't want anything to do about it. So they'll say oh call DOE call the civil support teams who also will not take command. They refuse to take command. They will support The Incident Commander and that will be a local hazmat captain or fire chief or something like that.
within one hour local hazmat teams can arrive to assist first responders but you need to know it's a dirty bomb and that's often the case so pretty much you have to assume if you have a car bomb in America you need to assume that it is dirty.
So these are the locations of the civil support teams. Every state has a civil support team and every region has a RAP [Radiological Assistance Program] team. The incident commander should be local. I say that because they care about their city. Someone coming in from another part of the country isn't going to really care about your city as much as you do. So that's why it needs to be a local incident commander.
Then you pretty much, again, delineate the area. You either tell people to shelter in place, don't go outside because the threat is outside. It's not inside. Modern building AC systems are very good at filtering out this kind of material. It used to be, people said, "oh turn off the AC or you'll drag particulates into the building". [No,] it turns out it's just the opposite. If you turn off the AC you'll get what's called a chimney effect, and you will then start to suck particulate into the lower floors and move them up. So it's kind of kind of strange in that regard.
Now this is controversial, absolutely controversial, you keep it an incident. You don't declare the incident over.
Because if the initial response is over it devolves to EPA.
Nothing will get done for a long time. Also EPA is, by law, required to pretty much capture every drop of water that's contaminated.
So if they're in charge of washing this... yeah the other thing is to, you know, just evacuate everyone and then slowly clean the place up like DOE cleans up contaminated sites.
You have to wash the heck out of this affected area within 72 hours, and again, it's the local Incident commander we can decide to do this.
By law an incident commander cannot be held responsible for any effects during the response.
He cannot be sued, he cannot be fired, because it's an incident.
Once he declares the initial incident over then everything else comes into play, including legal issues and stuff like that.
So this is kind of a bizarre intersection of of technical and and social and law.
How do you wash down an affected area so a 10x10 city block or affected area is about a billion square ft... that's a large area.
We have developed solutions to leech cesium out of cement. Well, a billion square feet you have that much of that solution on hand?
Is it in Jersey in tank cars ready to roll across the bridge?
No you don't. There's no way you're going to clean up a billion square feet with special solutions that you have to manufacture.
I mean at least not in in any time that's relevant.
So you pretty much have to wash the heck out of it with fire hydrant water.
You need to get it into storm drains and out to whatever like the Long Island Sound or or the Lake Michigan, whatever.
You're talking about, and you this sounds horrible, and the public just oh my God, no!
But if you're talking about a couple of kilograms of Ceasium-137 which is absolutely horrible... diluted in 100 million gallons of water is nothing.
I mean that's just just the way it is.
So, again, this weird fear-all-radiation is bad, you know, LNT threshold dose hypothesis comes into play even though no one even knows what that is.
So it's kind of a weird thing that various types of solutions again have been tested but the surface here is a billion square feet so 100 fire hydrants operating for 24 hours will deliver 100 million gallons of water and the fire department knows how to wash down buildings.
This is their expertise. Don't let anyone else do it, just let the firemen do their job and they know how to do it.
Do not attempt to contain the water but encourage it out to sea, or any other large body of water, just like we do storm water drainage.
Now there is ceasium removal efficiencies from building and paving materials within the first 72 hours.
The reason I say 72 hours is because after that cesium will begin to diffuse into concrete.
Slowly, but it will begin to diffuse into it.
And once it's diffused into it you have a problem getting it back out.
Since it's a hard gamma it'll still be pretty much dosing things, again depending upon the efficiency of the dispersal.
It won't be dosing a lot but it'll be dosing enough that everyone gets freaked out and the whole place shuts down for a year or two until we clean it up.
The way the material is is deposited it's just very light aerosol deposit that third level that I mentioned. The effects of soot chemistry on cesium chemistry effects of soot on season cesium is important resuspension in mobility. Meaning, if you do this in a dry day and then a big wind comes up then you will re suspend it and move it in a secondary sense. Tracking and traffic effects people walking on this or driving on it. It'll actually... you can think of it as two to a th000 foot-pounds in ter of driving it into the material.
And then there's the bomb pressure insertion around the bomb sites. Not a very large area so if that happens. You can clean that up.
Now it turns out if you just rinse this off with fire hydrant water the aerosol part comes up 100% again.
If you're not hurt by the car bomb itself... if you're not hurt by the car bomb you are unlikely to be contaminated to any significant degree.
And so the best thing is to just go home take a shower. Bag your clothes. Take a shower. Don't use conditioners or hair gel. You know, just wash yourself off well. You're good.
Thorium, uranium, plutonium anything else except cesium, cobalt and strontium, are not good as dirty bomb materials.
So the idea, everyone says, you hear this all the time, oh spent nuclear fuel oh you can make a dirty bomb out of it. No you can't. It's solid oxide. Metals. Ceramics. Whatever the form is in, it's not dispersible. And it's much harder to get those materials. I mean you can just order cesium chloride for $3 bucks a Curie. Why go anywhere else? That's a bargain price.