I woke up this morning to news of a 'hijacked truck loaded with radioactive materials'.

The breathless reporter provided three facts of note.

The truck was carrying a cobalt-60 source used in radiation therapy for cancer treatment.

Cobalt-60 is not explosive.

Cobalt-60 can be used in making a 'dirty bomb'.

These three facts were scattered across a two minute dissertation on just how horrible a dirty bomb can be and another two minutes on how a terrorist organization with a dirty bomb could...well...terrorize.

What they never bothered to mention, probably because it just isn't that exciting, is that the source from a cancer treatment machine is about the size of a thimble, and if you blew it up and scattered it over an area the size of a vacant lot it would be so dispersed that no one would ever know it was there.

Now, if you had an actual 'truckload' of cobalt-60 you could cause some serious problems. For one thing, you would probably have totally cornered the cobalt-60 market because there probably isn't enough refined cobalt-60 in the entire world to fill a truck so all the applications for cobalt-60 would come to a screeching stop. For another thing if you had that much cobalt-60 all in one place you would need so much lead shielding to be able to actually survive driving the truck that it would be buckling the roadways everywhere you tried to go.

TV News cares only about ratings, not about Facts. If they are not scaring you, your watching another channel.

Almost what CCNA said... If they are not scaring ye', you're watching another channel.

Ive seen one of the containers that the waste is in and its contents, just mostly wouldnt want it introduced into the enviroment, which would have been a better lead to the story.

That is why I usually hate American News programs but it is starting to get just as bad in Canada with the news.

News and Journalism has became so Tabloid that even the Tabloids from a generation ago looks more like a credible news source than today's credible news agencies.

If you introduced it into the environment any problems that resulted would be from the lead. That container in the pictures has a cavity inside that's about the size of a baseball...so there's a whole lot of lead. But lead isn't really all that poisonous.

The only way to accomplish anything with the Co-60 source itself is to keep it intact, because if you disperse it by either blowing it up or dissolving it somehow or whatever it would basically disappear into the ambient background. Now, if some enterprising assassin had the facilities to machine it into some unidentifiable form, say make a really good knockoff of a top brand pen out of it, then they could cause problems for somebody.