No the New Jersey drones are NOT searching for uranium or plutonium - gamma rays are BLOCKED COMPLETELY by 200 meters of atmosphere - and uranium and plutonium are not very radioactive
It is impossible to look for nukes or dirty bombs with drones. So that idea makes no sense. Plutonium is very unradioactive for a radioactive element. You would never get radiation sickness from plutonium.
Plutonium only gets radioactive with a chain reaction if you have a big lump of it - if you have a big enough lump for a sub-critical chain reaction it is dangerous - but if you have smaller lumps, it is one of the least radioactive of radioactive elements far less so than say cobalt 60 or polonium. But a nuke is designed precisely so it does NOT have a chain reaction going on until you need to use it.
Even if someone was making a dirty bomb using Cobalt 60 which is immensely more radioactive than plutonium, you couldn’t search for it with a drone. That’s because all the radioactivity is blocked by 200 meters of atmosphere
.
TEXT ON GRAPHIC
Why drones can’t detect plutonium or uranium
You can’t even detect Cobalt 60 at 200 meters
used as a gamma ray source
Plutonium is FAR less radioactive
Drones_can't_detect_plutonium_or_uranium.png
graphic from: S096980432200094X
This is also why the danger from fallout is the heavy dust. If you can get inside a house or a basement then you can block out nearly all the radiation - and also if you can get a distance from the radioactive dust - because radiation from radioactive material is short range and can be blocked.
We would all know this if there was any risk of a nuclear war. The reason we don’t know this is because the governments know there is no risk of a nuclear war. So we don’t need to be told.
If you worry about nukes see my:
You can't detect even Cobalt 60 which is very radioactive with drones from more than 200 meters away
Cobalt 60 is used as a gamma ray source.
It produces vast amounts of gamma rays but our atmosphere is opaque to gamma rays which is why gamma ray telescopes have to be in orbit above the atmosphere.
Almost all gamma rays are totally blocked at 200 meters.
Compare that with plutonium
Plutonium produces hardly any gamma rays
Could not be used as a gamma ray source
Can be detected with a gamma ray detector but only close up, e.g. to check if you have eaten any plutonium.
Not as any kind of a device if it is no longer functional - but the plutonium is somewhat poisonous though not very. A terrorist couldn't realistically make it into a nuke.
A nuclear explosion of course releases a lot of radioactivity but an unexploded nuke does not, all it has is slightly radioactive Plutonium (or Uranium).
If you have enough plutonium to start a chain reaction or to explode it is very radioactive.
But small amounts are so unreactive you can hold it in your hand - you need a glove which is enough to stop alpha and beta particles, just a sheet of paper can do that. And your body naturally produces hundreds of gamma rays per second from potassium - they are not harmful to us in low numbers.
QUOTE STARTS
Q: What is plutonium? Is it a metal like uranium?
A: Plutonium is, in fact, a metal very like uranium. If you hold it [in] your hand (and I've held tons of it my hand, a pound or two at a time), it's heavy, like lead. It's toxic, like lead or arsenic, but not much more so.
Q: How can plutonium harm you?
A: You have to eat it in order to harm yourself with it. It is radioactive, naturally. Radioactive, but much less so than radium, for example, which is scattered again all over the earth's crust. So it's not a very frightening material.
Q: So you say you hold it in your hand. What about the radiation that is emitted by plutonium?
A: The radiation from plutonium tends to be very easily stopped by any kind of shielding around the plutonium. A pair of gloves, paper. Certainly, a thin film of steel will stop the radiation from plutonium, so that it's perfectly safe.
Q: Is the skin on your hand is enough to shield yourself from plutonium's radiation?
A: The skin on your hand is probably sufficient to stop most of it.
Q: We've all heard that it's the most toxic substance in the world. Isn't it?
A: Well, I think it's absurd. It's not toxic. As I say, it's no more toxic than any other heavy metal, and its radioactivity is very considerably less than many other things that are on the earth's surface. It's an absurd statement.
. Frequently Asked Questions | Nuclear Reaction | FRONTLINE | PBS
So - Plutonium gives off alpha rays and beta rays each of which can be stopped by a piece of paper, and gamma rays which are comparatively penetrating but which are blocked by 200 meters of atmosphere. This means that even if the plutonium is in the open not covered in any casing you can't detect it more than 200 meters away with sensors.
And an unexploded nuke - however it is constructed it's basically two or more pieces of Plutonium or Uranium that are far enough from each other or separated by something so they can't start up a chain reaction - and so - not very radioactive. You then bring them suddenly together and so have enough for a chain reaction and at that point it does get radioactive but at that point the bomb is exploding.
So that is why using drones to search for nukes makes no sense.
Facts about plutonium: Backgrounder on Plutonium
And that is if it is lying in the open - if someone is keeping a nuke in a basement say, you could never find it because all the radiation would be blocked.
Or if they covered it in lead or metal or whatever to block the gamma rays.
Sometimes we do lose gamma ray sources especially when spacecraft crash. When we do that it is very very hard to find them. This graphic is from a paper that investigated how easy or hard it would be to find a lost gamma ray source at various distances from a road. They found that beyond 200 meters it is impossible even for Cobalt 60 which is an intense source of gamma rays that is used often for sterilization (you could never use plutonium to sterilize anything).
.
TEXT ON GRAPHIC
Why drones can’t detect plutonium or uranium
You can’t even detect Cobalt 60 at 200 meters
used as a gamma ray source
Plutonium is FAR less radioactive
Drones_can't_detect_plutonium_or_uranium.png
graphic from: S096980432200094X
The graphic is for cobalt 60 which is far far more radioactive than plutonium 239 which is used for nukes.
The shorter the half life the less radioactive. Uranium 238 and Plutonium 239 have long half lives and are very low in radioactivity. You could handle a lump of Plutonium 239 and it wouldn't harm you so long as you wear gloves or cover it in something like paper to stop the alpha and gamma rays. And even your skin may well be enough to protect you.
Here is someone handling the first ever sample of plutonium made that was large enough to study.
Here is a comparison, 0.0006 mg of Polonium 210 has the same amount of radioactivity as 12 kilograms of Uranium 238 such as is used in nuclear bombs.
https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/radiation/atoms-nuclides-radioisotopes/
Gamma rays are very penetrating over short distances but the high energies mean the atmosphere is opaque to gamma rays beyond about 200 meters.
This is why gamma ray telescopes have to be in orbit, we can't detect them from the ground.
So - you can only detect nukes AFTER they are exploded with radiation detectors. They are useless for detecting unexploded bombs.
It also doesn't make sense to use drones to detect dirty bombs. Because the whole point in a dirty bomb is to disrupt so a hypothetical terrorist would want everyone to know about it so they would do it somewhere where it is easy to detect such as in a city not drop a dirty bomb somewhere in the remote countryside where you have to use a search team to try to find it. So it doesn't make much sense.
And there are far simpler ways to cause chaos than a dirty bomb, just a conventional explosion, or for poisons: ricin, botulinum toxin and anthrax, and in practice no terrorist group has ever used a dirty nuke, and probably never will given how difficult it is to get the material compared to other ways of causing mischief. The closest is the Russians poisoning a spy with polonium. Alexander Litvinenko Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko - Wikipedia
But that is very unusual and rare.
And again drones wouldn't help either. A radiation detector that he walked through might.
The whole thing is just very silly and it's people talking bulls**t on the internet who don't know the first thing about nuclear materials.
The Mirror ran a story claiming that someone in the US had seen a nuke returned by Ukraine and that the drones are searching for this nuke.
"But there were over 80 nuclear warheads that were in Ukraine that came up missing. We don't know where they are."
Ferguson also recounted a conversation with a whistleblower who had direct contact with one of these warheads. He continued: "I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago who was trying to raise an alarm, to the highest levels of our government... about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on.
"He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine, and he knew that that thing was headed towards the United States." [NOT!]
[NONE OF THE UKRAINE NUKES WENT TO THE USA THEY ALL WENT TO RUSSIA - A COMMON MISUNDERSTANDING AMONGST PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW THE DETAILS OF THE BUDAPEST MEMORANDUM]
. [RED TOP TABLOID MAKES STUFF UP] Mystery drones over US 'are hunting nuclear bomb' [NOT EVEN POSSIBLE], fears military contractor
That makes no sense. Because Ukraine returned its nukes to the SOVIET UNION not to the USA. They were Soviet nukes. There is NO WAY that Russia would have agreed to Ukraine turning its nukes over to the USA. This is under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994
. Budapest Memorandum - Wikipedia
So it is impossible that anyone saw a Ukrainian nuke in the USA so it is just invented.
The Mirror is a red top tabloid. It is the UK equivalent of a US supermarket tabloid mixed with serious news.
This is a typical Red top tabloid story in another similar paper, the Daily Express:
Text on graphic: Typical Daily Express story
BLOG: About the Daily Express
The most famous red top tabloid story which ran in The Sun, another similar paper here. They made up the story that Freddie Starr, a comedian ate a hamster in a sandwich. He never ate any hamster
.
Freddie Starr ate my hamster,
Famous story by The Sun, a red top tabloid like the Daily Express.
You shouldn't believe anything they say like this though you can believe things like the obituaries and the sports results. But not stuff like this.
Plutonium could be made into a dirty bomb though far less hazardous than a Cobalt 60 dirty bomb, say because plutonium 239 has such a long half-life and is not very radioactive especially if people don't breathe it in or eat it.
It is roughly similar in hazard to lead, so making a plutonium dirty bomb would be a much more expensive way of creating a similar level of hazard to scattering lead dust in the air. Or for a more exact analogy because of the link to cancer, maybe like scattering asbestos dust in the air.
. Asbestos - Cancer-Causing Substances
It wouldn't give anyone radiation sickness. It might lead to a slightly increased risk of lung, liver and bone cancer later in life.
It would likely be far more of psychological in its effect than medical. Similar in medical effect to scattering asbestos dust in the air with an explosion.
Plutonium couldn't be detected from the air with drones.
About the toxic effects of plutonium.
https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/PHS/PHS.aspx?phsid=646&toxid=119
An incident in Russia where workers were exposed to plutonium and developed various cancers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4020282/
Plutonium would be useless as a gamma ray source because it produces so few of them.
It would be even harder to detect if in someone's house or basement or if covered in something like lead or metal.
It's highly unlikely there ever were suitcase bombs in the USA and surely Russia wouldn't have really lost suitcase bombs if they ever existed, seems implausible.
The FAA don't track drones.
In all this fuss nobody in New Jersey has been found who did anything illegal. They don't track legal ordinary activity - things like Walmart delivery dones, farmers photographing their crops, etc.
It is a bit like tracking every tractor in the USA, say. Or every quad bike. Or every mobility scooter.
Theoretically they probably could but have no reason to do so. And they would also need to think about the law and whether tracking them amounts to unreasonable searches.
See also
TEXT ON GRAPHIC: New Jersey senator Andy Kim with help of pilots identified “drones” reported by the public as planes and shared his detailed analysis online. He did this for just one location he visited with the police.
The FBI say MANY of the sightings they investigated were lawfully operated planes.
Andy Kim calls on the Federal officials to share their analyses with the public to help them understand better - like he did.
Details here:
Also
What’s more the government can’t track you without a warrant.
Class G airspace
- uncontrolled
- govern free
FAA don’t track aircraft or drones in class G airspace near the ground.No transponders. No Air Traffic Control.
Class G airspace:
So long as you keep to the rules - and have a license - you can fly a plane or drone of any size anywhere in Class G at any time.
No need to notify anyone flying visually at up to 238 mph below 10,000 feet.FAA graphic from: Class Golf Airspace
Details here:
Also
CONTACT ME VIA PM OR ON FACEBOOK OR EMAIL
If you need to talk to me about something it is often far better to do so via private / direct messaging because Quora often fails to notify me of comment replies.
You can Direct Message my profile (then More >> messages). Or better, email me at support@robertinventor.com
Or best of all Direct Message me on Facebook if you are okay joining Facebook. My Facebook profile is here:. Robert Walker I usually get Facebook messages much faster than on the other platforms as I spend most of my day there.
FOR MORE HELP
To find a debunk see: List of articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date See also my Short debunks
Scared and want a story debunked? Post to our Facebook group. Please look over the group rules before posting or commenting as they help the group to run smoothly
Facebook group Doomsday Debunked
Also do join our facebook group if you can help with fact checking or to help scared people who are panicking.
SEARCH LIST OF DEBUNKS
You can search by title and there’s also an option to search the content of the blog using a google search.
CLICK HERE TO SEARCH: List of articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
NEW SHORT DEBUNKS
I do many more fact checks and debunks on our facebook group than I could ever write up as blog posts. They are shorter and less polished but there is a good chance you may find a short debunk for some recent concern.
See Latest short debunks for new short debunks
I also do tweets about them. I also tweet the debunks and short debunks to my Blue Sky page here:
Then on the Doomsday Debunked wiki, see my Short Debunks page which is a single page of all the earlier short debunks in one page.
I do the short debunks more often but they are less polished - they are copies of my longer replies to scared people in the Facebook group.