All that talk about how dirty bombs won’t do a whole lot of damage outside the area in which they’re exploded? I’m calling bullshit on it. Because I am currently smelling the smoke from the North Carolina wildfires that are burning 200 miles south of me.
A wildfire that has burned nearly 30,000 acres in North Carolina is being blamed for the smoky conditions today in the Richmond area.
Local police have been getting numerous calls this morning from people wondering if there is a fire in the area because they are smelling smoke and seeing low-lying haze.
There is a fire; it’s just not here.
It’s actually the one that has burned roughly 45 square miles since being detected earlier this week in Hyde County, N.C.
“I was surprised, too, but the upper-level winds are . . . carrying the smoke all the way up to the Richmond area,” said James Foster, assistant forecaster in the National Weather Service’s Wakefield office.
Granted, radiation isn’t smoke. But particles are particles. And it seems to me that if smoke from a wildfire two hundred miles away from me can affect my area this strongly, I really don’t want to find out that Iranians or al Qaeda or Hezbullah or some other terrorist scumbags can manage to get the materials to set off a dirty bomb somewhere in my country. I just want them prevented from doing so.
True, but…
I suspect a 45 square-mile wildfire is putting a lot more particles in the air than what you’d get from completely vaporizing any radioactive substance small enough to be smuggled into the country.
I can’t imagine something that small, and that dispersed, bringing a harmful amount of radioactivity 200 miles away. You probably get a larger radiation dose every day from cosmic rays.
Something small? The size of a shipping container perhaps? There is also the prospect of several small shipments being smuggled in and assembled into a bigger bomb within the country. And since we are talking about people willing to kill themselves so they can kill you, the prospect of being irradiated while working on it is not likely to deter them. They won’t expect to live long enough to experience the cancers or other results of the exposure, especially if they set off the bomb manually.
While there are more particles coming off the fires the concept is still exactly the same. Look up the fallout maps for the nuclear bomb tests the United States performed.
Much of it was carried aloft, and then dropped in rather concentrated patterns hundreds or thousands of miles away.
And please remember that there is a very big difference between fission/fusion by-products that are light and have a very short half-life which are what most far drifting “fallout” was. And the highly radioactive dense particles of waste and processed Uranium that would probably be used in a “dirty” bomb. The half-life could be in the ten’s of thousands of years.
It’s not a matter of “instant” death, but getting a steady dose of REM’s over a period of days or weeks.