On guard for terrorists, New York City police find radioactive truck.

[NNadir]

NEW YORK: Days after New York authorities announced a suspected terrorist plot targeting Kennedy International Airport, police at a security checkpoint in downtown Manhattan were confronted with another threat: a grimy, radioactive truck.

"We have a mystery vehicle here," Deputy Inspector Hugh O'Rourke observed as his radiation detector crackled with a reading three times above normal.

O'Rourke's concern eased after officers discovered that the truck carried a bulky industrial vacuum used to clean out boilers. Isotopes from soot caused the high reading.

Though the truck was harmless, the inspection illustrated the New York Police Department's fear that the ragtag collection of commercial trucks rumbling through the city each day could be instruments of terror. In response, police have stepped up inspections and introduced an array of new technology to thwart possible plots.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/11/america/NA-GEN-US-Terror-Threat-Trucks.php

The reason that soot is radioactive is that coal typically contain pretty large amounts of uranium and its radioactive daughters. In fact the largest distribution of aerosol uranium in the world comes not from depleted uranium tank shells, and not from nuclear power plants, but from coal soot.

More details about the radioactivity of coal can be found here:

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

(Natural gas typically contains a fair fraction of the radioactive daughter of uranium radon.)

If a nuclear plant put out the same level of radioactivity as a coal plant, it would be shut, but fortunately nuclear power plants do not put out these high levels of toxic waste.

By the way the "three times larger than background" reading was almost certainly trivial.

One of the largest acts of terrorism on US soil, the now forgotten attack on Oklahoma City, involved a truck that was filled with dangerous fossil fuels. Dangerous fossil fuel terrorism continues to dominate terrorist acts around the world. In fact it would be safe to say that almost all acts of terrorism in the world involve dangerous fossil fuels.

[shain from kane]

1. "ragtag collection of commercial trucks" Could reach critical mass.

[NJCher]

2. Hmmm

See last two episodes of The Sopranos--maybe not asbestos, but the same idea.



Cher

[I_Will]

3. "...police at a security checkpoint in downtown Manhattan..."

Geez, I thought wewe only had security checkpoints "over there"

:scared:

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. Getting us used to the idea... nt

[Javaman]

4. I can see the headline now on faux news...

"rolling terror!!!!"

[Dead_Parrot]

6. Wow, that sucks.

:hide:

someone had to.

[NNadir]

7. We need to air this out.

Things like this don't take place in a vaccuum after all.

No one has to make dirty remarks, so I think it's time that we dust off the rules about blackening our perspective in a particulate way.

I would say more, but I already have the view that this conversation is radioactive, and I beta stop here. In any case, I have no penetrating remarks to make, at least any that would radiate good sense.