Stolen cobalt-60 found in Mexico; curious thieves likely doomed | Hacker News Reader

Stolen cobalt-60 found in Mexico; curious thieves likely doomed

washingtonpost.com

89 pointsbane104 comments

If something is that dangerous, shouldn't there be armored escorts, lojacks and all sorts of other security measures on it?

Isn't it criminally liable to transport something this lethal so carelessly?

I mean people were ready to declare this a terrorist's dream of dirty-bomb material.

We can't take more than 3 ounces of shampoo on a plane but actual dangerous stuff, no problem, just throw it on a truck.

We are talking about Mexico here right?

Yes, the country bordering one of the most wealthy nations on earth.

Not sure what the significance of this observation is supposed to be.

Pick up phone, call DHS - hey you know how you have a $100 billion budget and are supposed to monitor transportation security? We are about to transport something highly radioactive near your border, just thought you should know.

It would be the most closely watched transport ever.

In fact I am curious why the NSA didn't know about it and tell someone.

The place where this happened it about a thousand kilometers from the US border.

It is nowhere near the US, unless you somehow consider that all of Mexico should be monitored by DHS (and all of Canada too).

I agree with your sentiment, but although it was hijacked near Mexico City, 'nowhere near' seems a bit overstated:

"stolen earlier in the week in a carjacking as the material was being moved from a public hospital in the border town of Tijuana to a storage facility in central Mexico, news reports said."

Little known fact: The Constitution-free zone that extends 100 miles inside the border extends 1000 miles outside the border.

> It would be the most closely watched transport ever.

No. It would be one of thousands of such transports ocurring every year. A routine operation, not worth anyone's attention until the unexpected happened.

because of the condescending tone of "We are talking about México?", Mexico is the 2nd destination of US exports and the 3rd source of US imports, also is the 10th economy in the world by PPP GDP, also Mexico has facilities for enriching uranium, so I suppose that a Country like that must have regulations about radioactive material disposal.

It's also an unstable country in the middle of a fight it's not winning with tens of thousands of casualties a year. Parts of the country are not really even under government control.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War

Driven in large part by an insatiable lust for the currently illegal substances in the US. The US War on Drugs has disrupted tens of thousands of lives in the states as well as abroad.

Mexico is like any other country, there are places you feel perfectly safe at night, and there are places where you don't.

> Driven in large part by an insatiable lust for the currently illegal substances in the US.

Totally irrelevant to the original point. This discussion isn't about blame, it's about why anyone is surprised at Mexico being dangerous.

And Mexico is not like any other country. Journalists are regularly killed, people using Twitter to criticize drug cartels are killed and bodies are hung in public areas. Local governments and police live in fear. So no, it's not like any other country.

Your original comment argued that because the country was embroiled in a drug war meant that they could not possibly have effective measures for protecting radioactive material shipments in place. Pointing to a violent drug war to prove why they cannot safely ship radioactive material is disingenuous because their drug war is deeply entangled with ours. Your comment came off to me as follows, "those Mexicans can't even keep control of their country, so who should be surprised that this happened." That is what I take issue with. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but just flippantly declaring that there is a drug war without additional discussion is intellectually lazy, in my opinion.

> those Mexicans

That comes across as racist or bigoted and while I do think Mexico cannot control it's crime it's not for anything other than because they can't even keep their citizens or police from being killed.

And what I am saying is that Mexico would have a much easier time controlling its crime if there were not billions of dollars flowing southward from the United States into the hands of the cartels. The cartels are virtually invincible because of that money. If the US market for illegal drugs went away tomorrow, what do you suppose would happen to the crime rate in Mexico over the next few years? I believe it would go down dramatically as there would be much less incentive to be involved with the cartel.

EDIT: I should clarify that you are correct, you are statistically more likely to be randomly assaulted in certain parts of Mexico than you are in certain parts of the United States. What I am saying is that the problem is larger than Mexico simply being unable to effectively police certain factions of its citizenry.

> And what I am saying is that Mexico would have a much easier time controlling its crime if there were not billions of dollars flowing southward from the United States into the hands of the cartels.

This is totally fucking irrelevant in the given discussion. You just have an axe to grind and want to bring up some stupid anti-drug rant, however tragically true it may be, at any given moment, even when it's not appropriate. This discussion is not about why. It's not about it.

Relevance? The Bay Area is one of the most wealthy MSAs on Earth, but it also has the highest homeless population complete with constant childish gang rivalries.

Aren't we a little over-extended already...

> If something is that dangerous, shouldn't there be armored escorts, lojacks and all sorts of other security measures on it?

I think you underestimate just how common this and similarly dangerous chemical substances are. Every large hospital that does radiation therapy has this stuff.

> Isn't it criminally liable to transport something this lethal so carelessly?

You probably mean "criminally negligent", and I don't think the "standard of care" criterium extends to defending against malicious third party actions.

And yet highway robbery is the dirty secret the transportation industry doesn't want people to know about. It's an increasing trend in the transportation industry to install hard/software that allows for better tracking and incident reporting. Everything from robbery to driver "safety" ratings and insurance investigations.

I suspect this kind of transportation is far more common than most people realize.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that "3 million packages of radioactive materials are shipped each year in the United States."[1]

As for security measures: "The shipper must also meet the Department of Transportation's requirements for shipment of the nuclear material including route selection, vehicle condition and placarding, driver training, package marking, labeling, and other shipping documentation."[2] I suspect most of this was in place, or at least the Mexican equivalent.

Nothing about armed escorts is mentioned for general transportation of radioactive material. For spent nuclear fuel, "armed escorts [are required] in heavily populated areas."[2]

For another data point, here's a supplier of Cobalt-60's page on their safety: http://www.nordion.com/gamma/nordion_cobalt.html Again, there is no indication that armed escort would be expected, simply secure vehicles that won't leak radiation while delivering it or in the event of an accident.

All that said, Cobalt-60 is used for sterilization of medical equipment, radiotherapy, food irradiation, and quite a few other things. It's probably not that hard to obtain if you really want it.

[1] https://forms.nrc.gov/materials/transportation.html

[2] https://forms.nrc.gov/materials/transportation/shipping.html

Basically it sounds like a "dirty bomb" is not if, but when, someday. Lovely.

We're lucky that, as Bruce Schneier frequently points out with respect to airline hijackings, there really aren't as many terrible people out there wanting to indiscriminately kill hundreds or thousands as we all fear there are.

According to the Wired article about the radioactive container in Genoas port (2011, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/al...), Cobalt-60 isn't the first choice for dirty bombs. There are nastier isotopes out there.

See: Strontium-90

I agree it's not the first choice for a dirty bomb, but if you actually have access to a truckload of it, I can presume it's "good enough" rather than passing on it in the hopes of finding something better.

A truckload isn't all that much. I doubt the truck in the article was carrying more than a couple grams of the actual material. The lab grade sources we use (that are considered safe to handle as long as you don't eat them) are on the order of micrograms.

I have read that dirty bombs are a myth and technically infeasible.

Probably not. A lot of analysis has been done on dirty bombs and their likely effects, and the result of that analysis is that the vast majority of the damage would come from the bomb, not the radioactive material.

Basically, the bomb would kill anyone close enough to get dangerous radiation exposure, and leave a radioactive mess to clean up. People nearby would be exposed to small amounts of radiation, but would pretty much be fine in the long term.

The main power of a dirty bomb is that people overestimate its lethality. So my guess is that we will see at most one dirty bomb, after which people will cease to see it as a serious threat.

People don't react rationally to radiation. Twenty years later there will be people talking about how they got cancer from the increased radiation in the area where it went off.

do you have any resources handy to explain people that the word radiation isn't a synonym of death?

ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Alas, mortality does not seem to be relevant to how seriously people consider a threat. Look at the Boston Marathon bombings: 3 dead, total. And yet the reaction has not been to see it as a relatively nonserious threat (how many people died in car accidents that same day?).

We Americans are a panicked bunch. We scare easily the last decade or so.

It has nothing to do with actual risk here. It's all about "protecting us from the terr'ists."

Never mind the fact that the terrorists we fear so much don't even exist or are too incompetent or uneducated to carry out anything truly dangerous.

While I agree with your point about the sensationalism of "terrorism" over the past decade, I wouldn't go as far to say that "they don't really exist". I mean, I obviously don't know any more than what I hear from the media, but they certainly succeeded in pulling off a pretty complicated and deadly attack at peat once.

> I suspect this kind of transportation is far more common than most people realize.

Yup. A few doors down from Rap Genius in prime-post-hipster Williamsburg, Brooklyn is Radiac, a radioactive waste transfer facility[1]. I remember a few years back Vice made an amusing video where they went up to their back door with a geiger counter that started clicking rapidly much to viewers' delight.

[1]: http://bit.ly/Iu3mH8

It feels a lot like the style of regulation in the Western world, which is usually "just do a good job and we will worry about things that slip through the cracks when they do." In a basically lawful society you don't need to put armed guards on every dangerous thing.

Still, tracking hardware is a lot cheaper than it was 10 or 20 years ago. I work in that industry and there is a lot of competition so no one should have to go without.

One could argue that it's safer to transport the materials without the added attention from armored escorts, but they're probably just avoiding the added costs.

They may actually be right to, though. The costs of an armored transport is higher than a regular truck transport by an order of magnitude. The costs of calling in the cavalry that one in a million time that the truck is hijacked is probably far lower than securing each transport.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't be using lojacks and panic buttons for the drivers though.

> it's safer to transport the materials without the added attention from armored escorts

A colleague of mine who once worked at a nuclear power plant said this is precisely the reason. Also, as mentioned below, this material, while decidedly dangerous, is considerably less so than, say, spent nuclear fuel, which is actually moved in giant police escorts.

(Interestingly, they told me that some states actually refuse to have spent fuel trucked through their land, so often it has to be rerouted many hundred more miles between plant and destination.)

Yep. And why the FUCK was the transport container open-able by these jokers? From TFA:

"The cobalt-60 was found, removed from its casing, in a rural area near the town of Hueypoxtla about 25 miles from where the truck was stolen."

It's really hard to make a case that can't be opened with an angle grinder and a diamond cutter disk.

Granted, but it's not hard to make a container difficult to open. Case-harden that bitch and add a lock. In the Goiania incident it took those assholes days to open the container.

But they still opened it.

Nothing beats stupid and curiosity mixed (see: other brazillian scavender incident, where the guy found a bazooka rocket in a place similar to Goiania incident Cesium, and thought it was a good idea to disassemble it with a blowtorch, and ended exploding his entire family)

Granted again. Maybe these car thieves carry an acetylene torch with them, but otherwise there's no excuse to transport this stuff in a container that can be opened by a couple of dipshits on the run in a stolen truck.

It's really easy to put a sticker on it that says "This thing is radioactive and will kill you if you open it!" or so goes the $5 wrench theory.

Assuming you can read. And can read the language it's written in. Neither of those is a given.

Pretty sure the lethality is being grossly over-stated for the purpose of sensationalism

Not really, people have died from mishandling of this kind of radioactive material before: http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull472/...

111 TBq [1] and it seems like they carried it for more than half a kilometer after they removed the material from the shielding [2].

[1] http://iaea.org/newscenter/news/2013/mexicoradsource.html

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25224304

In a previous loss of Co-60 in Mexico (back in 1983), the material ended up being melted with recycled steel into rebar and used in all sorts of construction, until it was discovered largely by accident when a delivery truck carrying contaminated materials set off an alarm at Los Alamos[1]

It's also interesting that the Chenobyl Disaster was first detected in the West 2 days after the event, when detectors at a nuclear power station in sweden tripped their thresholds, and nobody could find a local explanation for the numbers[2].

[1] http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch09/cobalto.html

[2] http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull283/...

Sounds like a very similar chain of events to the Goiânia_accident [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

Devair Ferreira himself survived despite receiving 7 Gy of radiation.

Whoa. I wonder if some people have genetics making them slightly more tolerant of radiation.

This is a horrifying read too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acci...

A notable one (For us): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Bad interface design and bad engineering practices leads to multiple deaths.

Every see those vertical yellow gateways at border crossings and interstate weigh stations? Those are radiation scanners. Partially to keep terrorists at bay, but also to keep stuff like this at bay. In the 3rd world, this is sadly a frequent occurrence that these materials are used as scrap.

Example detector: http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/jpodocs/repts_te/14400_files/5_13.jpg

If you understand spanish, I recommend this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIalaC0M_A

It's a Uruguayan folk song about the accent, it's a really nice song but very very sad.

(If you don't understand Spanish, you might enjoy it anyway).

I think you mean accident, not accent. I was a bit confused at first.

This is surprisingly interesting.

One difference: one was a robbery, one was "found" (the Goiania accident - yes, technically stolen, from an abandoned place)

Maybe the Mexicans already realized what they stole (and the danger of it)

Another similar incident, this time in Juarez.

http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch09/cobalto.html

The hapless Sotelo--who, remarkably, seems to have escaped serious contamination--was arrested in 1990 on theft charges. In the prison where he still awaits sentencing, the guards call him El Cobalto--the Cobalt Man.

Ahh but that was Cesium 137. Much much more dangerous

"They will, without a doubt, die."

Pretty grim news for the thieves but you can't say they weren't warned. Medical waste has pretty big warning stickers all over, and you'd think the radiation symbol would be pretty universal in this day and age.

Fortunately/unfortunately, it's also probably not true. A previous incident in which people were exposed to Cobalt-60 over the course of several days caused 3 to die, and several more to become ill. If they just opened it up, saw it was a big chunk of nonsense, and left it on the side of the road, they'll probably be fine.

If they didn't actually touch the stuff, probably yes.

There's no way to know without knowing how much of the stuff was in the container. There could conceivably be enough to kill after brief exposure to the chest and head. If they picked any of it up, they will absolutely lose fingers or hands.

I was surprised as well that they said they would die. I find that very unlikely without more details.

Well according to a comment on the reddit discussion 28 seconds of exposure from a meter away is a lethal dose. No one just opens something for only 28 seconds, or stands a full meter away from it. God forbid if they actually touched the stuff.

Wouldn't that require knowing how much Cobalt-60 there was? Or is it always shipped in standard sized units?

They will 100% definitely die. Whether it's because of this, or soon, is a different question.

Or the police hope to scare them into seeking medical help or turning themselves in for hope of some sort of help.

Those poor idiots.

I feel nothing but disgust reading the comments cheering their lethal poisoning.

I could be wrong but it won't just be the idiots that die, innocents that come in contact with their bodies could also become ill.

There will definitely end up being others who were exposed to radiation during the transport/storage. This was linked on the reddit submission of this article and I thought it was interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

I don't believe Co-60 is capable of activating (making radioactive) other materials to any significant degree, so the danger is really only from direct exposure to the source material. So you get irradiated, but you don't become radioactive. If they were handling the material directly, there's a chance they contaminated themselves and their clothing, which could be transmissible. (c.f. Goiânia incident "[The scrapyard owner's daughter] was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, and applying it to her body, showed it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the sandwich she was consuming.")

Obviously the guys opening the shielding and anyone in the vicinity of where that happened, where it was stored, or dumped is at risk, but it also sounds like the sources were encapsulated into pellets which makes incidental dust contamination much less of a problem than in previous incidents where it gets broken up and mixed with dirt, etc.

AFAIK, non-radioactive materials are activated by neutron bombardment. Co60 is primarily a gamma emitter.

No this is not correct. Their bodies will not be radioactive (unless they ingested the cobalt!) after getting dosed by this source.

People get irradiated by similar sources of radiation everyday for cancer therapies without becoming radioactive.

You do them too much credit to call them idiots. They were armed robbers, who beat two men severely, and stole things of enormous value. They surrendered their right to be regarded as civilized people.

I would reserve 'idiot' for a citizen with poor reasoning powers. For instance, someone who pays too much for a used car.

I am pretty sure _quasimodo's point was, idiots or not, it's barbaric to celebrate someone else's slow and painful death. Regardless of whether said person is civilized or not.

That goes a bit far. I can certainly feel excitement and amazement at their folly and not be barbaric. I'm thinking folks are transferring their horror at the predicament these criminals got themselves into, to the spectators reaction which was a pretty natural one.

Well, these thieves are citizens with poor reasoning powers.

Being "regarded as civilized people" might be of interest to you, but I don't really like this habit of dehumanizing people when one doesn't like them.

You projected that; I admit they are human. So was Hitler etc. What they lose by violating the rules of a civilized society, is the protections offered by that society. That's got to be the case, else why would anyone follow the rules at all?

So yes, they Were citizens with poor reasoning powers, and that led them to violate the bounds of civilized behavior, which put them in their predicament - no protection/assistance/sympathy from those who continue to abide.

Its a spectacle to be sure - their painful death. Some will enjoy it and some be repulsed. Make your own choice there. But don't confuse that with 'dehumanizing'.

I can't quite figure out why I should feel bad for people who get themselves killed due to their violent criminal activities. It's about on the same level as the idiots who fairly regularly electrocute themselves while trying to steal copper. I don't particularly mourn their passing.

The innocents they may have poisoned in the aftermath get my sympathy, of course. But that just reduces my sympathy for the criminals all the more.

It's hard to make judgement without all the facts. Perhaps they were blackmailed into doing it, perhaps they were evil, greedy, disadvantaged in life... who knows.

You might not feel bad, but do you let out a cheer and fist pump and yell "ANOTHER CRIMINAL GONE YEAH!"?

Because death is not an appropriate response to stupidity or theft.

I agree, but they caused it themselves.

I don't think it is when decided and inflicted by a third party, but self-inflicted death on grounds of aggravated (c|st)upidity is hard to feel sad for.

How about for armed robbery and beating the truck driver severely?

Of course not.

Ya they are idiots and they deserve to go to prison, but I don't want them to die for it. And radiation poisoning isn't something I would wish upon my worst enemy.

The prospect that material that could be used in a radioactive dirty bomb had gone missing sparked an urgent two-day hunt

Seems like this could have been considered beforehand; maybe transporting this stuff in a lone vehicle with no security is not a good idea?

Depends. Lone truck with no security shouldn't attract much attention. But, you can satellite track it, and the container and have an always on communication path to the driver, and alert police to be ready if the driver burps in the wrong tone.

Poor bastards. Curiosity killed the cat, I guess...

Schroedinger's lojackers?

Cobalt 60 isn't particularly dangerous. I remember holding it in my bare hand in chemistry lab (encouraged by the teacher). Also, I'm never worried about when this stuff goes missing because it's so easy to detect to the smallest measurement - which means it's usually found quickly as was the case here.

Now if this was Cesium 137 that would be a wholly different matter

> I remember holding it in my bare hand in chemistry lab (encouraged by the teacher).

At a (not so remote) time, students used to put their hands into mercury to demonstrate that it is liquid but not wet.

Yea. And unlike cobalt 60, mercury doesn't decay. Hard to get that stuff out of your system.

Fortunately, it's also hard to get that stuff into your system.

  Elemental mercury is usually quite harmless if touched or swallowed.
  It is so thick and slippery that it usually falls off your
  skin or out of your stomach without being absorbed.¹

¹ http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002476.htm

Not all mercury is pure, though. Organic mercury compounds exist which behave similarly to elemental mercury but they have a greater health risk associated with them.

AFAIK it's not absorbed through skin, so that's not usually a problem as long as you don't aerosolize it. If you drop the droplet onto the floor, that's when the fun begins.

Cobalt-60 is more dangerous than Caesium-137 in every way except for chemical reactivity. Any significant amount is extremely dangerous. Don't be fooled: what you held in your hand was a vanishingly small source.

This little pdf has some metrics for comparison:

orise.orau.gov/files/reacts/radiological-terms-quick-reference.pdf‎

Edit: I haven't the brains to make the link above active, but if you search for the link on google it will take you there.

Linked failed. Repost please.

http://orise.orau.gov/files/reacts/radiological-terms-quick-...

I must have gotten mixed up. The wiki page has enough info rectify it. 5 year half life beta emitter is definitely serious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60

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