Orphaned Radiation

I posted this on my blog, but I thought I'd post it here as well to give you yahoos something to talk about:

The following excerpts are from an old article, titled “Database exposes threat from ‘lost’ nuclear material.” It was published in the Stanford Report on March 6th, 2002.

Steinhausler, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said that orphaned radioactive material presents a real threat because victims may not know that they have been exposed. "Many countries don't even have a central register of radioactive materials," he said. "If they don't know what they have, they don't know what they've lost."

A case in point: In 1997, La-Z-Boy Inc. made about 6,000 recliner chairs with steel from Brazil that was accidentally contaminated by radiation. About 1,000 chairs were sold in the United States before the contamination was discovered.

"The best description of the threat scenario is the U.S. itself," which has one of the best registration systems for radioactive material, said Steinhausler. Every year, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission receives 200 reports of lost, stolen or abandoned radioactive sources. "If the U.S. loses control of a registered source almost every second day, what do you expect goes on in the rest of the world? Whether it is in scrap metal or in terrorism, you will meet it again."

I love the fact that we lose control of nuclear weapons material “every second day,” yet we were concerned that Saddam had non-weapons grade low-enriched uranium (as indicated HERE) that is commonly used in power reactors (as indicated HERE).