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motai
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ABC News' Brian Ross spent four months investigating security at our nation's nuclear reactors. His report that will air tonight on ABC News' "Primetime." It concludes that terrorists would have a fairly easy time stealing some of the reactors. Ross says one of those soft targets is at Penn State University.
The investigation found that the guard outside the reactor at Penn State was unarmed and asleep in a lawn chair. The reactor contains material that a terrorist could steal and turn into a dirty bomb.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=local&id=3531902
Apparently these journalists have absolutely no idea about nuclear reactors at all. These are university reactors... they cannot generate energy as they are not connected to turbines, cannot really be "stolen", and can only pretty much heat up water (referring to the "swimming pool" type reactors that are in some universities). They would make a really poor threat for terrorists, unless they want to boil some water. And it seems to be hardly worth defending as well...
And as for the dirty bomb part, I will refer to Morbius' post on the thread below. From what I know of most modern-day nuclear reactors, they mainly use uranium (which has a long half life and low radioactivity) of some sort, uranium oxide or possibly MOX, dirty bombs cannot feasibly be made out of the material. (see link below).
https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=573611&postcount=20
...the NRC replied to TRTR to say that their investigation revealed that these were nothing but a bunch of ABC hooligans out for some cheap journalistic thrills. But the NRC didn't end there, going on to scold the entire adventure:
"The NRC continues to believe that trying to gain access to reactor facilities under potentially suspicious circumstances, especially in the current threat environment, creates unnecessary concerns, diverts limited resources, and inappropriately distracts from high priority law enforcement activities."
http://blog.nam.org/archives/2005/10/abc_goes_nuclea_1.php [Broken]
So the main question is... why does ABC propagate the anti-nuclear hype if they should know that the attention has no scientific basis? Plain old regular U-238 wouldn't make much of a use as a dirty bomb, so why do the journalists keep spouting it
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