We spend billions on "defense", and billions on "intelligence", yet these ridiculous oversights on the whereabouts of our nuclear and radioactive materials is woefully inadequate:

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http://earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=364&category=Environment

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June 24, 2002 Event Notification Report by U. S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission about Plutonium-242 and Americium-243 missing from a December
2001 shipment, not opened until May 20, 2002 and not reported by the NRC until
June 24, 2002. To date, no one knows what has happened to the radioactive
material supposedly encased in a flame-sealed glass container inside the shipping
box and protective plastic container. The FBI is investigating.

June 29, 2002 Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania - This week, the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory commission issued an Event Notification Report about radioactive Americium-243 and Plutonium-242 that are missing from a shipment between AEA Technology of Burlington, Massachusetts and Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York.

According to NRC and Department of Energy records, in the United States every year on average, about three hundred cases of missing radioactive materials are reported. Half of those are eventually recovered. But what about the other 150 cases of missing radioactive materials? Or the 9,000 missing nuclear items that the Department of Energy says it is trying to track?

Radioactive materials such as cesium in medical equipment, cobalt used in the food irradiation industry, americium used in oil industry research and spent rods from nuclear power plants can all be used by terrorists to make dirty bombs. All a terrorist has to do is have enough technical know-how to wrap stolen radioactive material around sticks of dynamite and blow it up. The radioactive contamination floating on the dust and wind could make dozens of city blocks in any city unlivable for decades to come. Imagine millions of New Yorkers trying to get off the island if one or more dirty bombs went off? The economic and psychological toll, beyond physical destruction from the explosion or explosions, would be huge ­ possibly requiring evacuation from most of the city.

What is particularly disturbing about this most recent Nuclear Regulatory alert about the missing plutonium and americium is the fact that the shipment was received on December 7, 2001. But the package was not even opened until May 20, 2002, five months later. That's when it was discovered the flame-sealed glass container designed to hold the radioactive substances inside the shipping box and protective plastic container was empty. The FBI was called in to investigate. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission waited until June 24 to issue the alert.

I talked about the dangers of missing and stolen radioactive materials in the United States with Scott Portzline. Scott helped the volunteer civilian Three Mile Island Alert group in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania monitor radiation and security near that nuclear power plant. He has testified before the U. S. Senate, the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards and other governmental bodies in an effort to close security gaps that he has found. His research has been cited by the U. S. Department of Energy and various military branches. Scott worries that dirty bombs and attacks on nuclear power plants are high on the Al Qaeda terrorist To Do list in the United States.