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AnthonyMouse 14 hours ago

> A dirty bomb remains viable with partially enriched materials.

A dirty bomb is basically Hollywood nonsense, and wouldn't use uranium to begin with because it isn't very radioactive.

The premise is that you put radioactive materials into a conventional explosive to spread it around. But spreading a kilogram of something over a small area is boring because you can fully vaporize a small area using conventional explosives, spreading a kilogram of something over a large area is useless because you'd be diluting it so much it wouldn't matter, and spreading several tons of something over a large area is back to "you could do more damage by just using several tons of far cheaper conventional explosives".

dralley 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also anything that is dangerous enough to actually be scary in dirty bomb form, like Cobalt-60, would be impossible to handle without providing a lethal dose of radiation to anyone working with he material within minutes if not seconds (presumably a reasonablely large & dangerous amount of this material is involved). At least, not without incredibly expensive equipment. And by the time you factor in those prerequisites it's just not worth it.

bandrami 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The toxicity of the Uranium would be a bigger problem than the radioactivity

AnthonyMouse 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And has the same issue with dilution, and is even more boring because there are much cheaper things with more chemical toxicity than uranium too, like lead.

adastra22 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It isn’t any more toxic than lead, which this bomb probably was filled with.