Small radioactive power generators left throughout the former Soviet Union could be a source of radioactive materials for terrorists looking to build a “dirty bomb,” the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, March 7).

The radiothermal generators (RTGs) were used by the Soviet Union as power sources for navigational beacons and communication equipment in remote areas, according to the Post.  Each RTG can contain up to 40,000 curies of strontium or cesium, of which a tiny fraction is enough to have a high probability of causing cancer.

Although cesium and strontium cannot be used to make a nuclear weapon, they could be combined with conventional explosives to make a dirty bomb, according to experts.

“This stuff can be just ghastly to clean up,” Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, said this month during a Senate hearing on radiological weapons.

In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, investigators are searching for at least two RTGs that are believed to have been left behind and stolen after a Soviet military base was closed, according to the Post.  In the eastern Russian region of Chukotka, investigators found a lack of controls on more than 85 RTGs installed along the Arctic coast in the 1960s and 1970s.

“The generators are placed on open land, are clearly visible from the sea and are visited by staff no more than once a year (in recent years, staff has not visited the sites at all),” said a report from a Russian commission that inspected the Chukotka generators in 1997.  “They would be easy targets for a terrorist attack, the consequences of which could be extremely serious.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency classifies Soviet RTGs as “orphaned” sources of nuclear material and has called for an effort to locate and safeguard them.

“They are a problem from the point of view of terrorism,” said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming.  “Since we can’t find them, presumably it would be hard for terrorists to find them as well.”

There is a wide gap between finding an RTG and taking it away to be used as a weapon, according to nuclear experts.  Potential terrorists tampering with a radiothermal generator would be at risk themselves, said Institute for Energy and Environmental Research President Arjun Makhijani.  If people knew what they were doing, however, RTGs could become a potent weapon in their hands, he said.

“If you don’t know what you are doing, it will kill you first,” Makhijani said.  “But if you know what you’re doing, it will do an extreme amount of damage” (Joby Warrick, Washington Post, March 18).

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