What exactly does announcing it immediately achieve? The quantity isn't enough to make a bomb with and announcing it will just lead to more nuclear hysteria. They also go ahead and claim military stocks of plutonium have gone missing but then go on to explain the discrepency is due to losses during processing of material and paperwork errors misrepresenting how much they actually have.
Speaking as someone who actually works in this field, the language used to describe check sources here is both a little funny and a little frightening.
The amount used to actually check functionality of an instrument is somewhere on the order of "barely detectable" and
The hysteria surrounding nuclear technologies is quite possibly more dangerous than the actual technologies most of the time.
Yes, the personnel who left sources in the back seat of a car were negligent, but the reason it wasn't reported was because the amount stolen was ultimately non-hazardous. They were fined, an incident report was filed, and that's the end of any reasonable action.
Devil's avacado, if we take such a lax stance towards nuclear-grade material being stolen, couldn't someone (or more realistically a group of people working together) eventually steal enough to make a bomb with while essentially flying under the radar?
No. First, the amounts present in such devices are absolutely minuscule. I'll assume that their sources are something like those listed on this page, for example. A 10 nCi Pu-239 sample would contain 159 nanograms (calculated based on specific activities listed in this document). Nuclear weapon pits contain around 3-4 kg of plutonium. Engineering issues aside, you'd need to collect 20 billion of those little buttons to get enough plutonium to make one bomb. That's probably several orders of magnitude more than the number of those things that have ever been produced.
That's assuming the sources stolen are even Pu-239. If they were Pu-238 sources then all you could do with them is use them to boil your water: Pu-238 is incredibly radioactive and glows red hot by virtue of its decay heat. More importantly, it has a ludicrously high spontaneous fission rate, almost guaranteeing a fizzle on detonation.
The quantity missing is probably only a few hundred milligrams. So you'd need to steal several thousand samples to approach the amount needed.
Please stop sharing that video as fact. The video is trash and they fail to prove anything. There aren't any missing nukes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2c-tMZSZtY
the possibiloty of a dirty bomb always exists I suppose given the very loose definition of such devices but in a practical sense, no because the equipment needed to reprocess say enough calibration buttons to do something with is not exactly common
The plutonium in these sources is electroplated onto thin discs of platinum, extracting them is a simple matter of dropping them into concentrated nitric acid. The problem is you'd need 63,000 of those things to get a single milligram of Pu-239, or 170,000 if they were Pu-238 sources.
Corruption/shady business, nothing special
oh ok, i thought like a plutonium foil, so ya they'd have to start stealing ridiculous amounts of them
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