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.
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, 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
It is nowhere near the US, unless you somehow consider that all of Mexico should be monitored by DHS (and all of Canada too).
"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."
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.
Mexico is like any other country, there are places you feel perfectly safe at night, and there are places where you don't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://iaea.org/newscenter/news/2013/mexicoradsource.html
"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."
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)