Saturday, January 24, 2009

FBI, ATF Investigate Germantown Wal-Mart Chemical Incident

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FBI, ATF Investigate Germantown Wal-Mart Chemical Incident

Posted: 23 Jan 2009 09:56 PM PST

FBI lab test results are expected next week as the investigation continues into the chemical

spill at a Wal-Mart store in Germantown.

The FBI is trying to identify a substance found at the store last Thursday. Germantown’s chief

said they’re not sure it’s the source of the fumes or if a crime occurred, but they’d rather be

safe than sorry.

“Do you have any hard evidence at the moment that it’s a crime?” 12 News reporter Colleen

Henry asked.

“No, we’re not calling it a crime,” Germantown Police Chief Peter Hoell said.

Hoell said investigators treated this as a crime scene to preserve evidence in case they

determine a crime occurred, but he said it may well have been an accident.

“You have a lot of chemicals in that store of varying degrees. Someone could have mixed

two chemicals not even knowing it, cleaning whatever,” Hoell said.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives collected samples of a chemical

found in the store. The FBI is testing it.

Hoell said they’re not even sure it was the substance involved, but in any case, he won’t offer

more details.

“We’re not going to identify what it looked like, how much, what it was made up of as far as

being liquid or powder or anything like that because if we discover it was intentional, it was a

crime, then that’s important for nobody else to know other than us and the suspect,” Hoell said.

Police have no suspects.

Back at the Wal-Mart, it was business as usual on Friday, but shoppers would like to know what happened…

“I guess I just didn’t know what to think about it, you know. At first, I didn’t really think it was nothing, but apparently it’s a little bit more serious,” customer Nick Peotzl said.

via Source

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Plutonium From Manhatten Project Discovered In Landfill - Hanford Site

Posted: 23 Jan 2009 12:19 PM PST

One of the most dangerous substances known to man has been found unguarded — in a

garbage dump.

Workers cleaning up the Hanford Site, a huge decommissioned nuclear research facility

in southeastern Washington state, came across an old safe buried in a pit.

Cracking it open, they found a glass bottle — which turned out to contain plutonium made

for the Manhattan Project in 1945.

Plutonium is extremely radioactive, and even a tiny amount could cause lung cancer in a

human who breathed it in. But this wasn’t just any plutonium — this was an extremely pure

sample of the fissile isotope plutonium-239, used to make atomic bombs such as the one

dropped on Nagasaki.

In fact, it now turns out that except for a tiny sample stored at the Smithsonian, the 400

milliliters from the bottle is the oldest batch of plutonium-239 in existence. It’s not enough

to make a nuclear weapon, but it’d be plenty for terrorist to manufacture a “dirty bomb” with.

All the other sizable samples of plutonium-239 from 1945 went into the Nagasaki bomb or

the Trinity nuclear-test bomb that preceded it. It’s not clear why this batch was left out —

or how it came to end up in a sealed safe abandoned in a landfill.

This story comes to us via Homeland
Security - National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America's trusted
source for homeland security news
and information.