Russia and the United States are going to hide from terrorists abandoned radioactive materials abandoned for unnecessary

Tobias h? Rner - Tobias Hurter, July 02, 2002

Rumors unexpectedly became a reality. Back in March, scientists introduced the US Senate International Affairs Committee on how the government quarter in the American capital can be radioactive. The charge exploded in the Garden of the National Gallery could cover the Congress Library and the Supreme Court with a radioactive cloud, turning them for decades into a forbidden zone. And then, two months after the hearing of the Senate experts, the FBI arrested the supporter of Al-Qaeda Jose Padilla, who supposedly wanted to undermine such a “dirty” bomb in Washington. “The hypothetical threat has acquired more than real outlines,” Speencer Abraham will later say.

Now the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) warned that the material for obtaining a “dirty” bomb can be found in any corner of the world. Therefore, the department of Abraham is going to stop radically a radioactive danger together with the Russian related organizations by Minat. On the territory of the former Soviet Union, which the US Senator Joseph Biden calls a “radioactive fairy -tale country with milk rivers and jelly shores”, it is necessary to protect “ownerless” radioactive materials that are lying everywhere until they fell into the hands of terrorists. For this, the American side allocates $ 40 million for the next two years, and Russia presents documentation related to Soviet times. Until now, the Russian state has been silent about its nuclear heritage, it may out of fear that it would have to be responsible for its use for criminal purposes.

Cesius was taken on trucks

The searches should take on the searches, which has been searching for radioactive sources in the territory of the former Soviet republics for more than one year. What difficulties will I have to face the Magate team there, it has become clear in the last weeks, when she had to walk on horseback and on all -terrain vehicles to comb an impassable area with an area of 550 square kilometers in Georgia in search of two so -called radiotermal generators. And unsuccessfully. “We are not sure whether we can rely on the information of the Russian side,” complains the representative of the IAEA Melissa Fleming.

To date, the group has been able to find six such generators in Georgia, but in the territory of the former USSR, presumably, more than a thousand such units rust. Previously, they provided electricity lighthouses, radio stations, and military bases simply due to heat released. In each of these generators there are strontium-90 or plutonium-238, having a radiation level of up to 40,000 kuri. This amount makes the Geiger counter to crack at a speed of 1.5 million billion per second. It would be enough to get a hundred "dirty" bombs. However, the radioactive substance is placed in a ceramic shell, and the craftsmen who would have taken up their construction would have to extract it with a threat to life.

However, terrorists could not risk it, since the “nuclear fairy -tale country with dairy rivers and jelly shores” could offer a lot of other opportunities. Recently, IAEA employees learned that, since the 60s, a radioactive irradiation method was used in Soviet agriculture to storage storage. The equipment was mounted on trucks so that it can be transported from one collective farm to another. As a radioactive source, Cesia-137 salt was used in a powder form with a radiation level of 3,500 kuri, placed behind a protective metal screen weighing a whole ton. Nuclear terrorists would only need to mix this filling with an ordinary explosive. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, trucks are used for other purposes, the fate of the cargo that they transported is unknown. In September, the Magate is going to start the search for such equipment for radiation in Georgia. “What sources of radioactive infection can still be encountered, we have no idea,” says Fleming.

If you take the problem on a global scale, then the IAEA report on the current situation looks even darker: the infrastructure to control radioactive materials is absent in more than a hundred states of the world. But the organization with headquarters in Vienna also does not have the opportunity to chase in these countries for every radioactive source. “We need a system of control over strong sources of radioactive radiation, starting with its appearance and ending with a burial,” demands director of the agency Mohamed Al Baradei.

Even in the United States itself, in the period since 1996, almost 1,500 radioactive sources have lost from sight, almost half of them could not be detected. According to the European Commission, approximately 70 sources disappear annually in the EU. Anyone who wants to acquire a “dirty” bomb will not experience a lack in the necessary material.

Translation: Tow Vladimir, Inosmi.ru
Published on the website inosmi.ru: 02 July 2002, 12:16 pm
Original publication: Jagd auf Strahlende Waisen

Hunting for radioactive "homeless".