How well protected are the irradiators against possible attack, theft, or sabotage?
Irradiators are about as well protected as your average movie theater. A coordinated team of suicide "terrmandos" using publicaly available information would have little trouble blowing these "hot" mothers to blazes ,as they are basically housed in "tin sheds",with a little concrete around the hot stuff so that the owners don’t fry the help. A common misconception held by most people is that they would have to steal the radioactive material to make a dirty bomb out of it, and use somewhere else. Another false premise is that it would be too deadly to remove the millions or so of curies of radioactive material(by the way a curie is one hell of a lot of radioactivity) without being radiation poisoned. Well-duh-they would be suicide bombers and would’nt live long enough to die from radiation.Nor would the intense radiation incapacitate them before they could slap some semtex and a detonator to the very localized and concentrated radioactive source.With a little more thought they might even construct a shield to block enough of the radiation to do the job with more time. This would not need to be a suit of armour weighing tons, but rather a simple and light enough sheet of lead to work with. It would not protect them from lethal exposure, but if they decide to avoid extra work of moving it ,and just blow the thing up where it is,with themselves, they would arrive in: "Jihad paradise" sooner. With a little creativity (about the level of an average 12 year old) they might even disperse the radioactivity using methods other than explosives. Most of the large food irradiators use cobalt-60, a very nasty and highly radioactive metal. Those who say that this makes cobalt-60 safe because it will only blow up into a few large easy to pick up fragments ,seem to think that the "terramandos" will use cherry bombs as a method of choice to spread the immense amount of radioactivity all over the landscape. A quick look through a few on-line catalogs will not take a rocket scientist to figure out many more "useful" devices. All of this is in the public domaine, and is easy to access and understand-except perhaps for those metrocrates in the Nuclear Radiation Commission, and others who have been sitting in windowless cubicles for too long.
