re: #162 Bubbaman

Not to diminish the risk in any way, but I doubt he had sufficient quantities of Thorium or Uranium to pose a serious radioactive dispersal threat. Check your basement for Radon - that’s a greater risk for you.

See my post, above. For a dirty bomb to be effective, all it has to do is trigger a Geiger counter. It doesn’t have to possess a dangerous amount of radioactive material, just enough to induce panic. People has an hysterical fear of ANY kind of radiation, and if any radioactive substance were released over a densely inhabited area - like Manhattan, for example - it would shut business and traffic in the area down for weeks, possibly months or even years depending on how bad the hysteria got. You’d also see lots of stress-related deaths - heart attacks, strokes and so on - even though you wouldn’t see a single case of radiation sickness.