Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation? (2011)

Why was this horrible article so long?

The answers you want to know in one paragraph:

Aside from a few scratches, there are no identifying marks on the cylinder to help investigators figure out what it is or where it came from. The encapsulated chunk of cobalt will make its way north to Leipzig, Germany, where a specialized firm will search it for a serial number and eventually melt it down and recycle it. Judging by its size and shape, the object was probably part of a medical device or a machine used to sterilize food. Disposing of such material is expensive; Italian officials won't speculate on how it got conveniently lost in a Saudi scrap yard. No one knows how the cobalt got into the container or how the container got into the system.

  "The radiation portals that were deployed in the aftermath
  of 9/11 are essentially fine, except for three problems:
  They won't find a nuclear bomb, they won't find highly
  enriched uranium, and they won't find a shielded dirty
  bomb," says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert and
  president of the Center for National Policy. "Other than
  that, they're great pieces of equipment."

In other words, we only have a "security theater" ability to prevent radiological weapons from entering the border. Like the TSA, this theatrical security creates jobs, consumes tax wealth, and enables politicians to say they took action to address the problem while simultaneously giving them someone to blame when an attack occurs.

It was a container full of scrap metal but a piece of radioactive cobalt...

> the box was stuffed at a metal yard in Saudi Arabia under the auspices of Sun Metal Casting, a scrap-metal dealer in the tiny Arab emirate of Ajman.

> Whatever was in the box was giving off gamma rays at 1,173 and 1,332 kiloelectron volts. It could be only one thing: cobalt-60 slowly alchemizing itself into nickel.

Interesting article but it was pub'd on 10.21.2011