Howard Hall, the joint UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Global Nuclear Security, has made numerous media appearances in recent weeks in the wake of the terror attacks in Belgium.
A common theme of those interviews centers around how worried people should be about terrorists’ ability to craft what is known as a “dirty bomb.”
“It’s something I worry about,” Hall told U.S. News and World Report. “We understand how to do good security in short doses, but we have so many challenges in the human factor that still aren’t addressed.”
Unlike an atomic or nuclear explosion, such a bomb is crafted not to achieve nuclear detonation, but for a traditional explosive to spread radioactive material.
The magazine noted that two of the three terrorists in Brussels had hours of secret recordings of a prominent Belgian nuclear scientist, prompting fears that the group might have been considering ways to blackmail him into getting material for them.
The full story can be read at U.S. News