Terrorists seeking to cause a radiological disaster, like the one at Fukushima or Chernobyl, would find it much harder to accomplish than making a dirty bomb.
I couldn't resist making a dirty joke about its homophone on Facebook, then, ashamed, deleted the post after news of fatalities came in.
"We are making a dirty, brown, dying-looking mess along the sides of our roads," a New England woman wrote angrily to her local newspaper last fall.
Other outfits that have developed technology for such schemes include Smiths Detection in Britain and, in America, Berkeley Nucleonics, General Electric, GENTAG, Passport Systems and Purdue University.The sheer danger of making a dirty bomb is a factor too.
Making a Dirty Projectors record come to life is like making a movie; I'm the one that makes the picture and then we all figure out how to realise it".
In the United States, between 1994 and 2005, the N.R.C. recorded sixty-one domesticaseses of stolen or lost isotopes in amounts that would clearly be useful to someone making a dirty bomb, although the majority of these involved iridium-192, which loses its potency fairly quickly.
