Doesn't Add Up - Last

Doesn't Add Up - Last week, ABC was whacking its audience over the head with "controversy"; radio promos for its story about its' smuggling of "Depleted Uranium" into the United States from Indonesia, to test Homeland practically crowed about how "controversial" the story was, even before it aired.

Something stuck in my craw (ouch); Depleted Uranium has very low, almost nonexistent, radioactivity. It's not the same as trying to find weapons-grade Uranium with a radiological detection device - depleted uranium is radiologically more similar to lead than weapons-grade material.

Didn't really look into it last week, of course, although ABC thought they had the story dead to rights:

The ABCNEWS project involved a shipment to Los Angeles of just under 15 pounds of depleted uranium, a harmless substance that is legal to import into the United States. The uranium, in a steel pipe with a lead lining, was placed in a suitcase for the shipment.

"If they can't detect that, then they can't detect the real thing," explained Tom Cochran, a nuclear physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which lent the material to ABCNEWS for the project.

Cochran said the highly enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons, would, with slightly thicker shielding, give off a signature similar to depleted uranium in the screening devices currently being used by homeland security officials at American ports.

Clayton Cramer has the rebuttal I'd have liked to have written. Read it, of course.

Posted by Mitch at September 15, 2003 12:51 AM