Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Basically it sounds like a "dirty bomb" is not if, but when, someday. Lovely.

We're lucky that, as Bruce Schneier frequently points out with respect to airline hijackings, there really aren't as many terrible people out there wanting to indiscriminately kill hundreds or thousands as we all fear there are.

According to the Wired article about the radioactive container in Genoas port (2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/al...), Cobalt-60 isn't the first choice for dirty bombs. There are nastier isotopes out there.

See: Strontium-90

I agree it's not the first choice for a dirty bomb, but if you actually have access to a truckload of it, I can presume it's "good enough" rather than passing on it in the hopes of finding something better.

A truckload isn't all that much. I doubt the truck in the article was carrying more than a couple grams of the actual material. The lab grade sources we use (that are considered safe to handle as long as you don't eat them) are on the order of micrograms.

Probably not. A lot of analysis has been done on dirty bombs and their likely effects, and the result of that analysis is that the vast majority of the damage would come from the bomb, not the radioactive material.

Basically, the bomb would kill anyone close enough to get dangerous radiation exposure, and leave a radioactive mess to clean up. People nearby would be exposed to small amounts of radiation, but would pretty much be fine in the long term.

The main power of a dirty bomb is that people overestimate its lethality. So my guess is that we will see at most one dirty bomb, after which people will cease to see it as a serious threat.

People don't react rationally to radiation. Twenty years later there will be people talking about how they got cancer from the increased radiation in the area where it went off.

do you have any resources handy to explain people that the word radiation isn't a synonym of death?

ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Alas, mortality does not seem to be relevant to how seriously people consider a threat. Look at the Boston Marathon bombings: 3 dead, total. And yet the reaction has not been to see it as a relatively nonserious threat (how many people died in car accidents that same day?).

We Americans are a panicked bunch. We scare easily the last decade or so.

It has nothing to do with actual risk here. It's all about "protecting us from the terr'ists."

Never mind the fact that the terrorists we fear so much don't even exist or are too incompetent or uneducated to carry out anything truly dangerous.

While I agree with your point about the sensationalism of "terrorism" over the past decade, I wouldn't go as far to say that "they don't really exist". I mean, I obviously don't know any more than what I hear from the media, but they certainly succeeded in pulling off a pretty complicated and deadly attack at peat once.

I have read that dirty bombs are a myth and technically infeasible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com