A record number of low-level radioactive materials, of the sort terrorists could use in making dirty bombs, cannot by accounted for in Canada this year.

This news coincides with a recent International Atomic Energy Agency meeting at which nuclear counter-terrorism specialists were informed of an almost four-fold increase in nuclear smuggling since 2006.

In addition to worries about highly-enriched uranium and plutonium, the ingredients for a nuclear bomb, officials are also concerned about nuclear material in millions of radioactive sources, typically in analytical equipment used in medicine, industry, agriculture and research – including (my note) academic research. Such material could be extracted and blasted into the air using conventional high explosives. The terrorists’ main intent would be to panic a population rather than inflict mass causalities.

Almost all of the materials stolen or missing this year are in the lowest radioactive categories posing potential harm to human health. But that is only partially reassuring, comments Wesley Wark, an expert on intelligence and security issues at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies:

All that means is that they themselves pose no threat; it is not proof that the system of controls is really working the way it should …[the message needs to get out] that there is zero tolerance for losses of radiation devices. (The Ottawa Citizen)