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Old 06-27-2018, 07:25 PM   #1
L.J.Steele
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Default Radiation-eating vampire

Big bad for my next Fate Core/Venture City/Supers game is likely to be a radiation-eating vampire. I'm thinking early prey will be folks with radioactive seeds for cancer treatment. Any other ideas for targets beyond the obvious?

Game is set in modern-ish San Diego.

Don't suppose anyone can comment or has sources on the Navy's storage at North Island NAS or what sort of things one might find in a hospital or medical lab.
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Old 06-27-2018, 09:04 PM   #2
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Radiation-eating vampire

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Originally Posted by L.J.Steele View Post
Big bad for my next Fate Core/Venture City/Supers game is likely to be a radiation-eating vampire. I'm thinking early prey will be folks with radioactive seeds for cancer treatment. Any other ideas for targets beyond the obvious?.
Probably the easiest commercial source of small amounts of radioisotopes are smoke detectors.

For San Diego, one that might not be immediately obvious is whoever ended up acquiring the assets of SureBeam, which was the largest food irradiation business in the US, and headquartered there until it went bankrupt. It's not actually clear exactly what the US food irradiation industry looks like - it keeps a low profile, but there are dozens if not a few hundred facilities scattered around the country, and security is going to be considerably lighter than on nuclear reactors, and possibly on hospital radioisotope generators.

Edit: And depending on what counts as radiation, well, x-ray technology is *widely* distributed, not only in every hospital and airport, but every dentist's office, pretty much every university chemistry or geology department, and the quality control division of anybody who manufactures large numbers of metal parts.
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Old 06-28-2018, 03:55 AM   #3
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Default Re: Radiation-eating vampire

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Originally Posted by L.J.Steele View Post
Big bad for my next Fate Core/Venture City/Supers game is likely to be a radiation-eating vampire. I'm thinking early prey will be folks with radioactive seeds for cancer treatment. Any other ideas for targets beyond the obvious?

Game is set in modern-ish San Diego.

Don't suppose anyone can comment or has sources on the Navy's storage at North Island NAS or what sort of things one might find in a hospital or medical lab.
The 2000 Bangkok and 2013 Mexico City incidents both involved junked cobalt-60 therapeutic sources being stolen (by people who clearly had no idea what they were dealing with). You should be able to get into the tens or hundreds of TBq with one of those.

(A smoke detector contains about 40kBq, typically americium-241. So you'll need to steal a billion of them to get the same amount of radiation as from one cobalt-60 pot.)
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Old 06-28-2018, 07:03 AM   #4
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Default Re: Radiation-eating vampire

Self-illuminating faces on (e.g.) watches, compasses, and exit signs contain detectable quantities of radioactive tritium. The last has enough in gaseous form that breaking a sign can contaminate an entire building's air supply.

Depleted uranium munitions are low-level radioactive. Tank and aerial gunnery ranges might have thousands of rounds buried over several square kilometers. The nearest to San Diego are probably at Fort Irwin and China Lake; it appears that Camp Pendelton ranges are restricted to training ammunition only.

Last edited by thrash; 06-28-2018 at 07:08 AM.
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Old 06-28-2018, 10:32 AM   #5
tanksoldier
 
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I’d think you’d need to specify what kind of radiation.... since just sitting in the sun for a bit probably exposes you to more than a smoke detector.
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Old 06-28-2018, 02:37 PM   #6
L.J.Steele
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
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I'm thinking of every increasing need for energy -- I'm vaguely thinking of the second episode of Space 1999, Season 1, with the guy who eventually walks into the nuke plant as the best source of power on Alpha.

So it starts with small stuff -- sources that would be higher energy than just sunlight, then the need gets greater and greater, with more and more effect for the PCs to trace, until a confrontation -- I've been looking at the San Onofre decommissioned plant, which has a bunch of radioactives on site, and is going to be less well guarded than the navy base's store of nuclear arms at North Island NAS.
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Old 06-29-2018, 02:03 PM   #7
tanksoldier
 
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Default Re: Radiation-eating vampire

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.and is going to be less well guarded than the navy base's store of nuclear arms at North Island NAS.
False. The guys DoE hires for that classification are the same ones who were guarding the weapons at a NAS or for the Air Force.... and they are equipped in similar fashion... and the guys doing it aren’t 18 year olds just out of security forces school, they’re guys who did that for 4-6 years then went thru DoE’s training and are now making 6 figures.

It’s similar to being a nuclear materials courier. They train constantly, expend incredible amounts of money and ammo on skills they work really hard to never have to use... and would fall all over themselves to get to the guys who actually gave them a chance to use them. Better than a stateside ISIS kill.

In some ways attacking the NAS would be easier.
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Old 07-01-2018, 11:02 AM   #8
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Default Re: Radiation-eating vampire

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... what sort of things one might find in a hospital or medical lab.
Maybe not emissive enough for what you're thinking, but my one medical imaging for a sprained ankle was gamma detection of injected Technetium-99. I'm not sure where it actually came from, but the story is there's a tunnel connecting the hospital with the nearby university physics department for rapidly transporting short-half life medical isotopes.

In San Diego, the beach? Lots of tuna plates at the local sushi shop? Based on rad levels in Pacific tuna from Fukushima. But seriously, at some point your vamp should be on a flight bound for FKS. Apart from the reactor itself, the countryside is covered in waste repositories full of bags of radioactive topsoil.
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Old 07-01-2018, 11:45 AM   #9
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Default Re: Radiation-eating vampire

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Originally Posted by L.J.Steele View Post
Big bad for my next Fate Core/Venture City/Supers game is likely to be a radiation-eating vampire. I'm thinking early prey will be folks with radioactive seeds for cancer treatment. Any other ideas for targets beyond the obvious?

Game is set in modern-ish San Diego.

Don't suppose anyone can comment or has sources on the Navy's storage at North Island NAS or what sort of things one might find in a hospital or medical lab.
It is a game, and so you don't need to be constrained by reality, just plausibility.

So patients with radioactive implants, implant hospital storage units, transporters moving the implants, the facilities making the implants, the shipments of radiative sources materials the implants are made from, and the reactor/accelerator facilities irradiating the source materials are all candidates. Besides the medical implants, there are radioactive solutions that are similarly shipped and moved.

Similarly for medical equipment and food irradiators - there is the faculties themselves, the shippers brining new sources and returning used sources (which are still radioactive, just not at the level desired for the operations), the facilities that fabricate the irradiation sources, the shippers that bring the radioactive material to the fabricators, and the reactor where the sources materials are made radioactive.

Then there are X-ray machines. Doctor, vet, and dental offices and hospitals have them, as do construction sites that do welding radiographs of piping and water content of road beds. Shipper bring new ones and take away old ones, Old ones are stored in dumps, Facilities assembly them, Shippers bring radioactive sources for the machines, and Reactors are used to generate the material.

Then there is the storage facilities for Low level waste (the medical waste), transuranic waste (items contaminated with plutonium, mostly national labs and DOE facilities), and high level waste (irradiated nuclear fuel, at nuclear plants and consolidated storage facilities, and the reprocessing waste from defense and commercial facilities at DOE sites). There are shipments from the storages facilities to disposal sites for the low level waste (several around the country) and transuranic waste (WIPP in Ne Mexico). High Level Waste may eventually be shipped to Yucca Mountain in Nevada (when it is eventually opened).

There are the radioactive materials we mine: uranium, thorium, coal, and phosphorus.

There are radioactive foods we eat, bananas and certain nuts being the best know.

Certain paints and glazes contain radioactive materials. Radioactive materials are used in emergency exit signage, luminescent watches and gun sites, and smoke detectors.

Irradiated naval reactor fuel is on ships in ports, and the cores at the end of their operational life are shipped to storages facilities (where they will follow the high level waste path).

Nuclear weapons and pit are shipped between facilities (DOE fabrication, DOE Storage, and Military bases).
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Old 07-01-2018, 05:12 PM   #10
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. US civilian nuclear facilities, on the other hand, tend to be secured by the lowest bidder: desperately undermanned and underpaid, with lots of cameras and other sensors so that they can show off the shiny security control room to the shareholders. (With a huge false alarm rate, so any real alarm will probably be dismissed until a bunch of others start going off.)
True, and any facility that doesn’t have material that can be weaponized will have lower security... I mean , even if you take over what are you going to do with it? To get the materials to make a dirty bomb would take hours or days and special equipment, or people willing to die gruesomely within minutes.

In a way the material is it’s own security... and security would be focused on preventing damage and sabotage not really around preventing radiation absorption by an intruder.
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