NEW YORK: Days after New York authorities announced a suspected terrorist plot targeting Kennedy International Airport, police at a security checkpoint in downtown Manhattan were confronted with another threat: a grimy, radioactive truck.
"We have a mystery vehicle here," Deputy Inspector Hugh O'Rourke observed as his radiation detector crackled with a reading three times above normal.
O'Rourke's concern eased after officers discovered that the truck carried a bulky industrial vacuum used to clean out boilers. Isotopes from soot caused the high reading.
Though the truck was harmless, the inspection illustrated the New York Police Department's fear that the ragtag collection of commercial trucks rumbling through the city each day could be instruments of terror. In response, police have stepped up inspections and introduced an array of new technology to thwart possible plots.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/11/america/NA-GEN-US-Terror-Threat-Trucks.phpThe reason that
soot is radioactive is that coal typically contain pretty large amounts of uranium and its radioactive daughters. In fact the largest distribution of aerosol uranium in the world comes not from depleted uranium tank shells, and not from nuclear power plants, but from coal soot.
More details about the radioactivity of coal can be found here:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html(Natural gas typically contains a fair fraction of the radioactive daughter of uranium radon.)
If a nuclear plant put out the same level of radioactivity as a coal plant, it would be shut, but fortunately nuclear power plants do
not put out these high levels of toxic waste.
By the way the "three times larger than background" reading was almost certainly trivial.
One of the largest acts of terrorism on US soil, the now forgotten attack on Oklahoma City, involved a truck that was filled with dangerous fossil fuels. Dangerous fossil fuel terrorism continues to dominate terrorist acts around the world. In fact it would be safe to say that almost
all acts of terrorism in the world involve dangerous fossil fuels.
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