A Radioactive Commute
By Greg L | 17 September 2008 | Fairfax County, Prince William County | 8 Comments
A Tuesday morning rush hour on 66 east, in Fairfax County. Traffic is jammed, as usual. It’s stop and go. The boredom of sitting traffic leads you to start looking at the traffic around you, and you glance at the label of the unusual ten foot long, four foot diameter container on the flatbed truck in the other lane. Uranium Hexafluoride.
Huh? And there’s another truck, just like it, two cars behind.
Where did I read about that stuff? Oh, yeah. That’s what they transform Uranium into when they’re enriching it in order to manufacture nuclear weapons. Uranium Hexafluoride can be heated to a gaseous state, and you can feed it into cascading centrifuges in order to get a concentrate of specific radioactive isotopes. Remove the fluoride after the refinement, turning it back into a solid metal, and you now have the perfect material with which to construct something that makes a Really Big Boom. Can’t say I’ve run into this before during a commute.
Or you can process it into what goes into nuclear reactor fuel, which I would presume is the case in this instance. There’s Calvert Cliffs in Maryland which could conceivably be the destination, since no one is making nuclear weapons in these parts. I can just imagine some trucker driving nuclear materials on the beltway during rush hour through the “dipsy doodle” between Interstate 270 and the 270 spur, though. Take that load through one of the several sharp turns on that stretch of road too fast, and you’ll spend a month filling out paperwork while some entrepreneur other than you makes a mint selling dosimiters to panicky Montgomery County liberals.
Some Einstein (or Fermi) decided to ship nuclear fuel on 66 and the beltway during the morning rush hour without any kind of escort, which just about pegs the stupid meter. Every year Prince William County and Fairfax County Sheriffs deputies identify over ten thousand unlicensed drivers on our roads, usually in the aftermath of an accident, and now these folks are driving among trucks loaded with nuclear materials in heavy traffic. Geez, at least give these guys an escort.
It seemed perfectly safe, but my ears will definitely perk up if anyone calls me “radiant.”
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good grief…that’s part of my commute
Hopefully the containers were full. When transporting UF6, the UF6 will have some decay (as all radioactive emitters do), but when UF6 decays it’s daughters are thorium (231 and 234 specifically if you care). Thorium is a gamma emitter…essentially the same as an x-ray and is highly penetrable. UF6 though when held in tight containers is a weak gamma emitter, but primarily sends out alpha particles, which isn’t dangerous unless you go sipping it with your morning latte. Alpha energy is the lowest radioactive emitter and is regularly stopped by a piece of newspaper (literally)…its penetrability if just small when the container is tight. More on radiation and nuc-rad response can be found at http://www.consurgo.org/Article%20-%20Nuc%20Terrorism.pdf .
There are two other possibilities to consider other than just a standard transport of nuclear material.
One, maybe the load of material has been dropped off and the driver just didnt adjust his placards. Certainly the containers could have been empty and our friends were driving empty. I can tell you that there are regular alerts throughout the local and state police communities about radioactive transport so if it isnt being escorted, it probably isn’t material.
Two, is it on the road to get you to notice? Let’s face it now and then you alert the media that you are starting a new security procedure or doing something “different” to combat our enemies with your eyes fully open to see who is watching the new changes, even though they have already been made. Maybe someone wanted to see how far you or Faisal Gil or someone else would follow the trucks and they were tailing those tailing the trucks? Just a thought.
What is really scary is a potential hijacking. No escort you say? The mob, and some gangs have become especially adept at hijacking semis foll of just about anything (TVs, Cigarrettes, other valuable, easily sold items). Not saying Tony Soprano or ICE Cube are looking to hijack a load of nuclear material, but if they can pull of heists like this, what is to stop an organized terror group from grabbing it. Sound’s like the makings of a dirty-bomb. It would be something stupid like this that would provide the material for the next attack.
Man, if these folks are surveilling me so closely that they could orchestrate the movement of nuclear material transports to coincide with my commute, they’re giving me a heck of a lot more attention than I deserve. I just can’t imagine that I’m any more significant than a pimple on the butt of a flea in this venue, and I’m not a whole lot more significant than that in any other.
Could these be empty and they just didn’t change the placards? I suppose so.
On the second point, if this transportation corridor is so juicy, someone could just hang out on a bridge over 66 and watch everything, which is a lot more coverage than some random guy driving on the road at the same time would ever get.
I didn’t try to tail anything, and even if I would have wanted to that’s not at all easy in heavy congestion. I had somewhere to go, and as fascinating as this was, I just didn’t have the time and it’s not important to figure out where this is going. It was on the road I commute on. It was hugely unusual. It happened at a time I thought was not well chosen.
And I understand Faisal Gill doesn’t commute on that route.
What’s this? Are you braking with the pro-nuclear conservative mainstream? What’s next? You advocating energy saving light bulbs, planting trees and believing in global warming. Craziness.
These power plants are owned by private corporations. Your job as a conservative is to criticize government not the private sector. Let liberals rail against the corporate world.
Shouldn’t this be reported? Has it been reported?
It should be reported, but Greg, you’re missing my point. It isn’t anyone wants to see if you follow the “nuclear material” which is really just an empty container with a placard, it’s who is following. It’s also just one option.
Again, the containers could be empty…we’re assuming they were full, which is pretty unlikely in my experience with nuc material transfer.
As to Flavius Maximus…I have to say aloud there are a lot of folks out there in the criminal world smart enough to figure out how to put together a dirty bomb with rad material that is a lot easier to come by then UF6. Let’s face it…dirty bomb = rad material and explosive. Plenty of construction sites have the explosive material and the rad material is at the same places the kids buy their explosive material.
Let’s face it in 1995 a kid — an Eagle Scout candidate to be correct — put together a radioactive emitter using materials from the house and hardware store. Bad guys aint gonna wait for someone to haul this stuff into their hands…they go get it.
This is just business as usual. These transports go on all around us all the time, and have for many years.
Empty and forgot to flip the placards? I don’t think so.
Escorted, not usually, unless it is munitions grade nuke matter already.
Tailed? Not likely, but not unheard of.
GPS tracked? Very likely.
Many years ago, pre-911, I made my living hauling radioactive materials and explosives, lots of explosives. (There’s something you did not know Greg) I did this just about everywhere east of Joplin, Missouri. Since this was home, I brought a lot of this stuff here for the weekends. I never once had an escort on the public highway for this type of load.
I do know that the more sensitive materials were shipped with three man driver teams, one driving, one in the sleeper, and one literally riding shotgun. (All had some level of security clearance) Some of those loads had federal agents following. All these high profile loads were actually unmarked so as to not attract attention. If you see one of these, you will never know what you are looking at. Kind of like seeing a military airplane fly overhead never thinking that it may have a nuke racked inside.
Anyway, the stuff that travels around us everyday would scare you to death if you only knew, and worried about it. I hear trains rumbling through Manassas every night and wonder what just passed my home.
Incidentally, I have seen the casks that have been sitting in pier warehouses in Norfolk, VA for years just waiting to be hauled out to sea and dropped to the ocean bottom. Those casks were as big as my house. I don’t know if they are still sitting there. They were for spent fuel, perhaps from our Naval fleet??? Incredible!
What should really be of concern to us is the fact that all the companies that transport these materials and all sensitive US Government loads were bought up by foreign countries years ago! (Not long after the Johnson years)
Everything that moves under US govt. contract is computer logged and tracked by non-US governments!
That’s right Greg, that load was being tracked, but by whom?