Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[ergo sum]

Yes well I am still living in a house that has all the openings covered by plastic and duck tape and I am still waiting for Tom Ridge to tell me it is safe to come out.

The hysteria over things like dirty bombs is a perfect example.

NEW YORK — The "dirty bomb" allegedly planned by terror suspect Jose Padilla (search) would have been a dud, not the radiological threat portrayed last week by federal authorities, scientists say.

At a June 1 news conference, the Justice Department said the alleged Al Qaeda (search) associate hoped to attack Americans by detonating "uranium wrapped with explosives" in order to spread radioactivity.

But uranium's extremely low radioactivity is harmless compared with high-radiation materials — such as cesium and cobalt isotopes used in medicine and industry that experts see as potential dirty bomb fuels.

"I used a 20-pound brick of uranium (search) as a doorstop in my office," American nuclear physicist Peter D. Zimmerman, of King's College in London, said to illustrate the point.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122305,00.html