arrgghh...

[kengr]

Watching NCIS LA, they just determined (maybe) that a fairly small box they are trying to track down is "full" of uranium.

Uh. No. Not possible.

Assuming it's enriched (only real reason for smuggling it this way), that much that close wouldn't go "boom" but it *would* be well over critical mass, and you'd have gotten a horrendous burst of radiation as you got the chunk close together, killing everyone in the vicinity. And continuing to do so for some time thereafter.

If you got them together faster, the reaction would be more energetic. Blowing the pieces away from each other.

[later]
Oh. It's supposed to be "powdered" and brown. That'd be uranium oxide. Somewhat safer, but...

[still later]

Oh lord, they are going to use it to "take out" a building by using the HVAC system to spread finely divided powder. Uranium oxide is a *lousy* choice for that.

It's not very radioactive. It's not toxic at all because it's insoluble. So the danger is the dust getting loidged in the lungs or the digest tract, and *eventually* causing cancer. Years, decades down the road.

You'd kill more people with readily available pesticides or any number of other toxins.

The writers are idiots.

Comments

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I vote for you to be their science advisor.

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

I'm glad they are more concerned with the story than they science. No point in "helping" anyone out here. Not that a TV script will confuse a sophisticated attacker, but it might prevent the underwear bombing crowd from doing anything successful.

[kengr]

Thing is, you can avoid "giving help" without being as *stupid* as this ep was.

Hell, now that I think about it, since it apparently was either "natural" uranium or more likely *enriched* uranium, they could have built a *dozen* nukes using that much uranium!!!

The "gun" type doesn't require that much precision to make, and doesn't need the fancy triggers and stuff an implosion device does.

All the tech for *that* has been open source for decades. (For example the old Analog article about how to build a nuke and "wake up the neighborhood")


So all this episode did was increase the *useless* paranoia about nuclear materials.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I have a book with the detailed plans for Little Boy and Fat Man. More general descriptions of various fission and fusion designs have been published for decades. In fact, a child's science encyclopedia I had in the Sixties had a good general description of how the gun design works.

As has been repeatedly said, the only secret about the atom bomb is that it can be made.

I also remember that Analog article. Which I believe deliberately overstated some of the risks involved.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Maybe the terrorists are just trying to ruin the business with cleanup costs. :-)

I mean, given the panic over a few drops of spilled mercury (solubility and evaporability so low you can drink it with little risk) for this the EPA might require the entire block dug out to bedrock and double-bagged for remediation.

[kengr]

If they go with paranoia, then yeah. If they go with actual risks, it's bad, but not horrible.

Oh yeah, they did the usual "It'll be contaminated for millennia" bit.

*sigh* With some fairly ordinary cleaning, you'd get the background count down to normal levels for many buildings (say ones with a lot of granite in them).

Oh yeah, see my reply above about how the same amount of uranium oxide could be turned into maybe a dozen simple, easy to build *nukes*.

(Note that if it isn't enriched uranium, they don't *need* to smuggle it, because uranium oxide has industrial uses)

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Slightly off topic, but connected. Remember the people claiming they measured high radiation levels inside destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles? It was blamed by some among the ignorati on the depleted uranium armor penetrators used to destroy them. (Despite the fact that DU is less radioactive than many natural ores. That's what "depleted" means.)

Turns out the instrument dials in many of the Russian built vehicles had radium paint.

[my-real-head.livejournal.com]

But it's homeopathic DU. It remembers the radiation no matter how much you dilute it.