Attention Terrorists: The Theft of Nuclear and YOU

An earlier post was devoted to “The Arafat Mystery” (http://thenuclearcatastrophe.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-arafat-mystery.html ). The burning question was.....did Yassar Arafat die from poisoning by radioactive polonium-210? The polonium was found on his toothbrush. So his body was exhumed this year after his death in 2004. According to an article in the LA Times 11/7/2013 Swiss forensic examiners found sufficient traces of polonium in Arafat's remains to conclude with relative certainty that his cause of death was polonium poisoning. The question remains as to who placed the polonium to which he was exposed.

Arafat died at 75, less than a month after falling ill with what doctors thought was influenza. He had vomiting, nausea, and abdominal pain, which are also symptoms of radiation poisoning. However, these symptoms are rarely diagnosed as such, unless the person has been known to be exposed. Radiation poisoning was used in 2006 to kill a KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko in London. Supposedly it was put into his tea. Again, the perpetrator is unknown, and the guilty party would be thought to suffer some exposure himself!



And now we have had nuclear material stolen from a medical device (such as an x-ray machine) being shipped by truck to a disposal site in Mexico. The truck was stolen from a gas station. The device was found later in a field but the nuclear material had been removed. Please read the following article as to the danger of handling this material. A person could die in as little as one hour.



While terrorists may think this nuclear material is something to add to their home made bomb.....hopefully they will be dead before it is completed.






Mexico Says Stolen Radioactive Source Found in Field

The international radiation symbol, or trefoil, indicates hazardous radioactive material. (Graphic: IAEA)

Mexico has informed the IAEA's Incident and Emergency Centre (IEC) that it has located a dangerous radioactive source that had been missing since the truck on which it was being transported was stolen on 2 December 2013.

Mexico's "Comisión Nacional de Seguridad Nuclear y Salvaguardias (CNSNS)" said law enforcement authorities tracked the teletherapy device down to a field near the town of Hueypoxtla in Mexico State, very close to where the truck was stolen, at around 14:00 (20:00 UTC) on 4 December 2013.

The radioactive cobalt-60 source contained in the device has been removed (by the thieves) from its protective shielding, but there is no indication that it has been damaged or broken up and no sign of contamination to the area. Police have secured the area around the source to a distance of 500 metres.

The source, with an activity of 3,000 curies (111 terabequerels), is considered Category 1. The IAEA defines a Category 1 source as extremely dangerous to the person. If not safely managed or securely protected, it would be likely to cause permanent injury to a person who handled it or who was otherwise in contact with it for more than a few minutes. It would probably be fatal to be close to this amount of unshielded radioactive material for a period in the range of a few minutes to an hour.

Mexican authorities are assessing potential radiation exposure to persons who may have been close to the unshielded source, and hospitals have been alerted to watch for symptoms of such exposure.

People exposed to the source do not represent a contamination risk to others. Based on the information available, the Mexican authorities and the IAEA believe the general public is safe and will remain safe.

The CNSNS and the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares (ININ) are preparing plans to recover and secure the source.

The IAEA remains in close contact with the Mexican authorities. It believes the actions taken in response to the discovery of the source are appropriate and follow Agency guidance for this type of event.



From Rueters:
As a follow up, the truck was found on Wednesday close to where it was stolen outside Mexico City. The thieves removed the radioactive material from a protective case, exposing them to dangerous levels of radiation then dumped it less than a mile away.

The truck was stolen on Monday while it was taking cobalt-60 from a hospital in the northern city of Tijuana to a radioactive waste-storage center, Mexican officials and the UN agency said earlier.

"Both the container and the radioactive source have been located," said Mardonio Jimenez Rojas, an official at the commission, told Reuters. "The radioactive source was removed from its container and was found a kilometer away."

"The thieves were exposed to radiation," he added, saying those exposed to the material could die. Experts were working on how to secure the radioactive material in a protective container, he said.

The vehicle was seized when the driver stopped at a gas station in the town of Temascalapa, 35 km (22 miles) northeast of Mexico City. Truck hijacking is common in Mexico and the theft occurred in the State of Mexico, which is not a drug cartel stronghold.

"Our suspicion is that they had no idea what they had stolen. This is a area where robberies are common," Fernando Hidalgo, spokesman for the Hidalgo state prosecutor, said earlier.

In 2000, three people died in Thailand after a cobalt-60 teletherapy unit was sold as scrap metal and ended up on a junkyard. About 1,870 people living nearby were exposed to "some elevated level of radiation," according to an IAEA publication.

About the same time in Mexico, homes built with metal rods that had been contaminated by stolen cobalt were destroyed, a spokesman for the attorney general's office said.

"Cobalt-60 has figured in several serious accidents, some of them fatal," said nuclear expert Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank. "If dispersed, cobalt-60 or other radioactive source material could cause radiation poisoning locally."

Story Resources

• Mexico Informs IAEA of Theft of Dangerous Radioactive Source, 4 December 2013
• IAEA Incidents and Emergencies (IEC)
• Comisión Nacional de Seguridad Nuclear y Salvaguardias (CNSNS)
• Listen to this story
  

(Note to Media: We encourage you to republish these stories and kindly request attribution to the IAEA)



Los Angeles Times article: “Arafat probably poisoned, say Swiss Scientists” written by Carol J. Williams November 7, 2013



http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/05/us-mexico-nuclear-iaea-idUSBRE9B30J820131205?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews

THE ARAFAT MYSTERY

“At first the blood pressure was ninety over sixty. Rubbing his hands together, his fingers felt stiff, his right arm heavy. His blood pressure dropped slightly – 85 over 50 and harder to hear than before.

The pain began in the tips of his fingers. At first he couldn't really call it a pain. It was more of a numbness – an unpleasant lack of feeling. The numbness eventually gave way to a persistent electric discomfort– worse when he pressed down, but not completely gone when he didn't. Huddled in the darkness he tested his fingertips one by one. All of them ached. It was just nerves, he thought.

Then the buzzing pain began in his toes. He began to be frightened. He reached up to his cellphone to call someone. The effort of reaching was excruciating. He glanced at his hands. The fingers and thumbs from the first knuckle to the tip had turned almost black. The rest of his hand was a dusky gray. As time passed his left hand, now fixed in a semi claw was nearly useless. He could work his right arm and fingers, but even slight movements of them sent intense pain shooting up his arm. Then the blood pressure went down to seventy-five systolic. It couldn't be heard in the right arm at all. The arm, from at least the elbow to the hand was dusky and mottled. For whatever reason, the arteries and smaller arterioles supplying blood to that limb had become blocked. To a lesser extent the blood flow to the left arm and both legs seemed compromised as well.

His hands and feet were throbbing. The cold gray hands with their blackened fingertips looked like out of a horror movie. He glanced at herself in the mirror. Something was wrong with his face. It took several seconds to understand the dark streams of blood that had begun winding down from his nostrils, across the top of he lip and alongside the corners of his mouth. He watched as his front turned a deep crimson as stain spread over the groin and legs. He was hemorrhaging from his nostrils and mouth. Fresh and drying blood covered him and was spatter on the floor and wall. Suddenly he threw up and it was all bright red blood. He tried to speak but the words were only in his mind. They would not come out. His vision seemed blurred, and there was glazed fear in his eyes. The left side of his body was paralyzed. Terror beyond any he had ever known took hold.

DIC - disseminated intravascular coagulation – the most dramatic and horrifying of all blood-clotting emergencies. A fatal stroke caused by a cerebral hemorrhage was a terrifying possibility.” (1)

Yasser Arafat, 75, died in a French military hospital near Paris on Nov. 11, 2004. His health had deteriorated suddenly during an Israeli military siege of his Ramallah, West Bank, headquarters. French hospital reports attributed his death to a massive brain hemorrhage, but gave no details on what caused a related blood condition called disseminated intravascular coagulation, also known as DIC.

No autopsy was done at the time of Arafat's death at the request of his wife. But she later filed a lawsuit spurring a French investigation. French medical teams ruled out poisoning and an 8 year Palestinian investigation found no conclusive evidence of foul play. However, In July 2012, tests carried out by the Swiss Institute of Radiation Physics as part of a nine-month investigation found traces of polonium in quantities much higher than could occur naturally on Arafat's personal belongings, such as his clothes, fur hat, and toothbrush used in his final days. (2)

Polonium is a highly radioactive element occurring in uranium. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident, in 2006 was announced as due to Polonium poisoning, but never definitively proven. It has also been suggested that Irène Joliot-Curie was the first person to die from the radiation effects of polonium. She was accidentally exposed to polonium in 1946 when a sealed capsule of the element exploded on her laboratory bench. In 1956 she died from leukemia. According to the book The Bomb in the Basement, several death cases in Israel during 1957–1969 were caused by Polonium. A leak was discovered at a Weizmann Institute laboratory in 1957. Traces of Polonium were found on the hands of professor Dror Sadeh, a physicist who researched radioactive materials. Medical tests indicated no harm, but the tests did not include bone marrow. Sadeh died from cancer. One of his students died of leukemia, and two colleagues died after a few years, both from cancer. The issue was investigated secretly, and there was never any formal admission that a connection between the leak and the deaths had existed. (3)

But, for imagination's sake, is it possible to visualize what could have happened to Arafat? How would the polonium contamination get on his hat, his clothes, his toothbrush? Wouldn't someone have to have transported and opened a sealed capsule of the radioactive material? And wouldn't they themselves be exposed? Perhaps in this day of suicide bombers, that is of no concern to some terrorists. Where would the terrorist obtain the polonium? There probably is a black market for everything – or a government could easily provide it from their uranium stockpiles. But just as we never found out who, beyond the actual assassin, was responsible for killing John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, this too will probably remain a mystery.

By November 24, 2012, Arafat's body had been exhumed from its concrete encasement, samples taken, and he was reburied. Testing will be done in Switzerland, France, and Russia with results expected in a few months.

1. Based on a fictional account of DIC in “Natural Causes” by Michael Palmer
2. Los Angeles Times, “Remains of Arafat to be exhumed” by Maher Abukhater & Mark Magnier
   11/25/12
3. Wikipedia