In the late 1970s I was a teenager growing up in Denver, CO and part of the anti nuke movement.
At the time Denver had a special place in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and the anti-nuke movement. Just outside of Denver there was factory building nuclear weapons called Rocky Flats [Nuclear Weapons] Plant. When it was created in 1957 it was about 15 miles northwest of the city. By the 70s the city was much closer. Builders also had the additional foresight to put it on a windy plateau.
But that wasn't the only dangerous thing near Denver at the time. Much closer than Rocky Flats was the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, It produced
both conventional and chemical munitions, including white phosphorus, napalm, and mustard gas. RMA is also one of the few sites that had a stockpile of Sarin gas
along with pesticides. It had a huge stockpile of Mustard Gas in the late 70s and was the site for the "safe" disposal of that gas (and others).
There was also the Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Power Plant (it now uses natural gas to generate electricity). You could take some comfort that it was about 40 miles away as the crow flys. (if you had any comfort in that knowledge Chernobyl destroyed it. Because you learned that there was only one nuclear power plant in the US built like Chernobyl, and Fort St, Vrain was it(2))
Living in Denver you knew that there was a Soviet Nuclear Weapon pointed at you. I used to joke that if I were the Soviets I wouldn't even bother with the expense of a nuclear war head, I'd just put a conventional warhead on the missile and let our own stupidity do the rest.
I don't know when I first heard the words "dirty bomb," but I clearly understood the concept of it. Including, before 1980 rolled around, that our own ignorance and arrogance in hazardous waste management could be used against us.
Currently there is a sink hole in Lousianna, the size of 3 football fields, filled with naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM), which is a often a waste by product of the oil and gas drilling process. It was "disposed of" in artificially carved "storage" caverns, and some of it may have been dumped illegally.
The growing waste slurry inside the Bayou Corne Sinkhole includes radium, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, other volatile organic compounds [butane] and components of natural gas.(1)
Radium degrades to a carcinogenic gas; radon and the radium in the sinkhole is 15 times higher than what is considered safe.
If the butane in the sinkhole vicinity exploded, it would meet, according to the National Terror Alert, the definition of a dirty bomb.
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What is that definition?
What is a Dirty Bomb
A dirty bomb, or radiological dispersion device, is a bomb that combines conventional explosives, such as dynamite, with radioactive materials inthe form of powder or pellets. The idea behind a dirty bomb is to blast radioactive material into the area around the explosion. This could possibly cause buildings and people to be exposed to radioactive material. The main purpose of a dirty bomb is to frighten people and make buildings or land unusable for a long period of time.
-- National Terror Alert Response Center
There are charges that the state of Lousianna is downing playing and under reporting the seriousness of the problem (Fukushima anyone?)
Stanley Waligora, a New Mexico-based radiation protection consultant and leading authority on health risks of naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) has confirmed that radium levels at Bayou Corne's sinkhole are not within safe limits, but instead, roughly 15 times higher than the state's acceptable level, according to one of the nation's leading environmental attorney's Stuart Smith.
“Well, once again the Louisiana DEQ is in denial because they don’t know what to do about the radioactive contamination in the Bayou Corne subsidence,” Waligora wrote, adding the following findings:
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Residents have expressed concern about the terror aspects of setting the butane to light, They were told yesterday that if the cavern has fractured there is
little that can be done.
Want some more good news? The sinkhole is in Isaac's "cone of uncertainty"
On the eve of Hurricane Katrina's seventh anniversary, the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) is urging south Louisiana residents to prepare this weekend for Tropical Storm Isaac since part of the state, including its giant sinkhole area, is in the “cone of uncertainty” where the storm could make landfall, according to the National Weather Service. Even if south Louisiana does not take a direct hit, Isaac is threatening the already unstable sinkhole swampland area with more water, flooding and winds carrying its contaminants further.
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'Worst nightmare coming true,' says attorney
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more,
here and
here