Radioactive

WELDON SPRING, Mo. - They had a little time after picking peaches and before swimming, so Marie and Tom Burrows decided to take their grandson Zack to America's newest tourist attraction: an enormous pile of radioactive waste. His flip-flops flapping as he ran, 9-year-old Zack Aiello scrambled up the mini-mountain of boulders that entombs waste from decades of bomb making: TNT, asbestos, arsenic, lead and, above all, uranium, purified in this St. Louis suburb to power the Atomic Age. From the top of the mound, seven stories up, Zack scanned the sprawl of the dump.

MIAMI - A Sunrise, Fla., man with ties to extremist Islamic groups has been arrested on immigration charges after federal agents discovered his friendship with Jose Padilla, who is accused of plotting to set off a radioactive bomb. Adham Amin Hassoun, 40, an outspoken and active member of South Florida's Muslim community, was arrested at his home late Wednesday by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He was charged with overstaying his visa, one federal source said. Authorities hope he will provide clues about how Padilla, who was raised in Chicago by Puerto Rican parents, was transformed into Abdullah al Muhajir, a radical Muslim.

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials announced yesterday that they had arrested an American citizen who was working as an al-Qaida operative and was plotting to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States. President Bush ordered the suspect, Abdullah al Muhajir, whose birth name is Jose Padilla, turned over to the Pentagon as an "enemy combatant" who may be held indefinitely. The allegations underscored the Bush administration's frequent warning that al-Qaida remains an active terrorist network that is determined to strike at Americans.

The Howard County section of The Sun reported on a stolen radioactive moisture-density gauge ("Radioactive gauge stolen from construction site," March 19). Beside the facts of the current event, the article brings to light an unbelievably negligent attitude about handling radioactive devices. Issues concerning radioactivity are often discussed without any quantitative measure, making it impossible to distinguish minor mishaps from major concerns. I want to applaud Julie Bykowicz of the Sun's staff for reporting not only the loss of a radioactive device but also giving a few numbers so that the magnitude of the problem could be evaluated.

A gauge that contains a small amount of nuclear material was stolen from a construction site in Columbia late Friday or early Saturday, the Maryland Department of the Environment reported yesterday. The moisture-density gauge holds Cesium-137 with a radioactivity level of 700 millirem, MDE spokesman Richard McIntire said. "We're not talking about something that causes an acute physical reaction," McIntire said. "If you walked around with [Cesium-137] in your pocket for 10 hours, you may start getting some burns."

YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. - President Bush picked a 1,200-foot-tall, flat-topped volcanic ridge yesterday as the site to entomb up to 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste now piling up at 131 commercial, military and research reactors around the country. Bush, who announced his decision in a letter to Congress, said, "Proceeding with the repository program is necessary to protect public safety, health, and the nation's security because successful completion of this project would isolate in a geologic repository at a remote location highly radioactive materials now scattered throughout the nation."

The metal containers designed to carry spent nuclear fuel from the Calvert Cliffs plant and other reactors to a proposed storage site in Nevada would have failed if the transport train had been engulfed in the estimated 1,500- degree heat of the Baltimore rail tunnel fire last summer, according to a consultant's report prepared for the state of Nevada. More than 300,000 people would have been exposed to radiation leaking from the containers, built to withstand 1,475 degrees for 30 minutes, said the report compiled by Radioactive Waste Management Associates, which was hired by Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects.

An international team of experts has flown to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to try to recover two highly radioactive objects that were found near a mountainous region controlled by Muslim rebels, officials said yesterday. The objects, cylinders not much larger than a can of string beans, caught the attention of three woodsmen because nearby snow was melting. The men lugged the surprisingly heavy objects to their campsite for warmth and soon became dizzy and nauseated. A week later, they had radiation burns.

Move over, heavyweight boxing champion Hasim Rahman: The Atomic Wedgie is here. The robot -- built in a Catonsville garage -- is in San Francisco for the five-day Memorial Day weekend BattleBots competition. "BattleBots" is the popular Comedy Central television show in which radio-controlled robots compete in a ring where they try to bash each other to pieces. At 325 pounds, the Atomic Wedgie is a battery-powered machine that rolls on tank-like treads and will enter the arena as runner-up from the super-heavyweight division of last year's tournament.

The document has an innocuous title, "Applications of Nuclear Physics," as if it were part of an introductory college course. Its authors are identified as Iraq's Atomic Energy Agency and two weapons research centers. Then come the words "TOP SECRET." In 105 pages including charts and graphs, Iraqi authorities in 1987 described their efforts to develop bombs that would have used conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material produced in a nuclear research reactor. In three field tests, the designers determined that the one-ton device would indeed explode, and then detonated a bomb on the ground and dropped two from Iraqi aircraft.