Tulse wrote:
That’s probably true for building an actual nuke, but dirty bombs are very easy to make, and if you’re not worried about eventually dying from radiation poisoning, the handling techniques don’t even need to be very fancy. A very small group of relatively non-technical people could slap one together from the appropriate materials (which are basically a van full of fertilizer and fuel oil surrounded by some spent rods), much more easily than such a group could build a reactor to breed the radioactive material.

Spent fuel is SO radioactive that it cannot be transported without heavy specialized shielding. Even if a terrorist got into a facility housing spent fuel, or hijacked a train/boat transporting it they would not be able take it out storage, or if it is already packaged up to open the container and get more than 100m without keeling over dead. At this level of exposure you die withing minutes not days/weeks, so even if you’re prepared to die you can’t get as far as making a bomb out of it.

So short of strapping enough explosive to blow a whole reinforced transport container into order to disperse the contents, high level waste is not that much risk for dirty bombs.

The main risk for dirty bombs as I see it is raw uranium, unused fuel, and radioisotopes prepared for medical uses. ie. stuff that is safe to handle as long as it isn’t ingested or inhaled, and is transported all over the place without much security.