Ummm. . . all you people fretting over the "dirty bomb" please read this.

[Brian_Expat]

Dirty bombs are a hoax with no radiological danger even when the most severe radioactive materials available are used.

People who sunbathe on southern California beaches get more radiation in a year than someone who is 1/2 a mile from the worst possible dirty bomb explosion twice a year.

The media know this, the Boston Public Health authorities have noted this for years, but curiously, the media hasn't reported the truth -- that "dirty bombs" are a silly scare tactic out of a bad Clancy novel.

Read and learn and then get annoyed that you're being manipulated.

http://www.cosmiciguana.com/archives/003254.html

The latest post-9/11 disaster scenario making news headlines is the "dirty bomb." The theoretical situation occurs when terrorists get hold of radioactive material from a hospital or food-irradiation plant, attach it to an explosive, and detonate the bomb in an urban area. The explosion spreads the radioactive material all over a city and exposes the population to radiation. Yet according to a health physicist, the biggest health risk from a dirty bomb would not, reassuringly, be cancer, but something more preventable: panic.

A dirty bomb "would probably not lead to many, if any, cancer deaths," says Andrew Karam, radiation safety officer of the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. But if the public receives unreliable or exaggerated information about dirty bombs, Karam worries that "the use of a radiological weapon would result in many deaths in traffic accidents as people flee the scene, and possibly stress- and anxiety-induced heart attacks."

The radiation dose from a dirty bomb would likely be relatively small, says the Rochester health scientist. Even a potent dirty bomb, consisting of a radioactive cobalt-60 rod used for food irradiation, for example, would deliver an average dose of a few tenths of a rem for people within a half-mile radius, he says. (A rem is a unit of radiation dose.) This compares to the 0.3-0.4 rem average dose per year that a person receives from natural sources...

[DS1]

1. Your theory leaves out plutonium

But hey, what's a little plutonium?

I'm not freaking out about this, and I live closer to Boston than about 99% of DU, but.. whatever

[lenidog]

2. I was just about to say that

what if they didn't use nuclear waste and tried something a little stronger