Glow in the dark criminals in the news

There is nothing more fun then writing about stupid criminals and just how stupid they can be. In this case, we have a group of Mexican criminals who thought it would be a good idea to hijack a truck.

There was just one small problem. These geniuses stole a truckload of Cobalt-60 ((Cobolt-60)). Initially, when the news came out that a load of this stuff had been stolen, a lot of people thought it was a terrorist group that did it and that they were planning to build a dirty bomb. For those of you who don’t know what a dirty bomb is, (Hint, it isn’t one that skipped a shower this morning), it is a bomb made with regular explosives, dynamite, C4, Semtex, whatever will make a nice big boom. Then you pack it with radioactive material, put it someplace and set it off. The initial blast doesn’t have to do any actual damage. it’s all the radioactive material that does the damage.

Needless to say, everyone started looking for this stuff, from the Mexican police to the CIA, NSA and the entire alphabet soup of United States federal law enforcement agencies. The good news is they found the truck and the material. The better news it what else they’ve found. Here are some of the details from the Associated (with terrorists) Press:

Six people tested for possible radiation exposure have been released from hospital but remain under detention as suspects in the theft of a truck carrying highly radioactive cobalt-60, officials said Friday.

Of the detained men, ages 16 to 38, only the 16-year-old showed signs of radiation exposure and he was in good health, a spokeswoman for Hidalgo’s Health Department said on condition of anonymity because she isn’t allowed to discuss the case.

Well, being in good health after exposure to radiation doesn’t really say much. It can take a few days or weeks for the effects to hit.

Hidalgo state Health Minister Pedro Luis Noble said earlier Friday the men suffered from skin irritations and dizziness, but that none were in serious condition. Only one was vomiting, a sign of radiation poisoning.

The serious condition comes later as their insides basically, dissolve. So, just how dangerous was this stuff?

The atomic energy agency said the cobalt has an activity of 3,000 curies, or Category 1, meaning “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.”

Now, to get a blast of radiation from this stuff, these geniuses would need to open the shielded container. It looks like that’s just what they did.

The truck was found abandoned Wednesday about 40 kilometers (24 miles) from where it was stolen, and the container for the radioactive material was found opened. The cobalt-60 pellets were left about a kilometer (half mile) from the truck in an empty rural field, where authorities said they were a risk only to those who had handled them and not to anyone in Hueypoxtla, the closest town of about 4,000 people. There was no evacuation.

The good news here is that the clean up should be relatively straight forward if messy.

Authorities maintained a 500-meter (yard) cordon around the site where the cobalt-60 still remains in the state of Mexico and continued to work Friday to extract it safely, said Juan Eibenschutz, director general of Mexico’s National Commission of Nuclear Safety and Safeguards.

“It’s quite an operation and it is in the process of being planned,” he said. “It’s highly radioactive, so you cannot just go over and pick it up. It’s going to take a while to pick it up.”

I am no expert in this. I would assume they need to get a trained crew in with the appropriate equipment to clear up this mess. I’m guessing they will need to bring in specialists from the United States, Europe and/or Russia. I would not be surprised if they don’t use some sort of robots to clean this all up, and they might need to strip some of the top soil off as well.

Getting back to the idiots who stole the truck, while most of them probably aren’t showing symptoms yet, I will not be surprised if they aren’t all given nice funerals with lead lined coffins. Of course, those coffins will probably be buried in a site dedicated to radioactive disposal. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of morons. Even if they survive, what senorita is going to want to have children by them? The ladies of Mexico want healthy, normal children, not mutants with three eyes and flippers. It’s always nice when criminals thoughtfully remove themselves from the gene pool, even if they survive the process…for a while.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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