Basically yes, that’s exactly how it would work. “Dirty bombs” are not nuclear per se, they’re conventional explosives that are meant to spread nuclear material.
After 9/11 America was afraid of a Improvised Nuclear Something made out of used uranium. How would that work? Just get a piece of dynamite and some nuke dust and light the dynamite?
Submitted 2 days ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
amio@lemmy.world 2 days ago
yesman@lemmy.world 2 days ago
A dirty bomb wouldn’t “work”. As in it wouldn’t cause any more damage or fatalities than the explosives would on their own. You’d have to hang out at ground zero for a while to get radiation dosages that are dangerous, and other than having to clean the effective area like a super-fund site, the explosives are still the dangerous bit.
The Chernobyl disaster was similar to a dirty bomb, and no terrorist could hope in their wildest dreams to get that much nuclear material. But even with the scale of nuclear release, and gross mismanagement of the event, today the site is contained and safe to visit.
Nuclear is just scary, that’s it. I’ve often wondered if the whole idea of a dirty bomb was to get the terrorists to waste any nuke material they found.
sartalon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think the biggest concern is inhaling or ingesting the “dirty” material. Our skin does a pretty good job providing some protection against the low levels of the alpha emissions of depleted uranium. However, if you were too inhale or ingest, then you face direct absorption, which carries significantly higher risk.
CombatWombat@feddit.online 2 days ago
Basically. The uranium isn’t to make the explosion larger, the explosion is to disperse the radioactive material over a large area quickly. The fear is you’d make, like, metro Boston uninhabitable for a generation and give a million people cancer.
DomeGuy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It’d kinda work, but not so well with uranium itself.
(A bunch of other atomic age materials like plutonium are radioactivley deadlier.)
The real goal of terrorism is to make people afraid, so they either change behavior or exert political pressure on their government to change behaviour. It doesn’t often work, often backfires, and when it does on occssion work we tend to stop calling the guys who set the bombs as terrorists.
socsa@piefed.social 2 days ago
Thats the Hollywood version of a dirty bomb, but there are much “better” ways to use radiological sources for a terrorist attack than just launching some uranium dust around, like contaminating water and food supply chains with certain radioisotopes known to bioaccumulate. Certainly an explosion could be part of this, but it would be arguably more effective to contaminate a reservoir or farm quietly so there would be a delay in detection and mitigation efforts.
axh@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Basically dynamite will blow up and spread radioactive dust so one explosion can do additional damage
Sualtam@lemmus.org 1 day ago
Every accusation is a confession. Just look at DU-munition in the Iraq War if you want to know how dirty bombs work.
MantisToboggon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yes.
Patnou@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yep that was it.