Radiation-eating vampire

[L.J.Steele]

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.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

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.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

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.)

[thrash]

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.

[tanksoldier]

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.

[L.J.Steele]

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.

[tanksoldier]

.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.

[dcarson]

Possible targets.

The UCI Nuclear Reactor Facility is part of the Chemistry Department, of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

The McClellan Nuclear Research Center (MNRC) is owned and operated by the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and is located in Sacramento — only 25 miles from the main campus providing easy access to the facility.

https://www.nukepills.com/nuclear-re...eactors-in-us/

[cptbutton]

Something I was told about in college. Back in the 1950s or so they got a serious radioisotope source for research which was stored in its own little out of the way building in an appropriately massive lead container. They stopped using it at some point, but never got around to disposing of it.

In the 1970s sometime someone realized it was still there and blanched at the prospective furor if word got around that it was still there. So there was a careful very quiet effort made to get it shipped off for proper disposal. Which was a bit tricky since you needed a big forklift and truck to move it, and more recent buildings were in the way. They managed it finally, leaving only the story to be shared with physics majors such as myself.

So you could handwave having some such semi-forgotten source at a college or university of the right age.

[tanksoldier]

.The McClellan Nuclear Research Center (MNRC) is owned and operated by the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and is located in Sacramento — only 25 miles from the main campus providing easy access to the facility.

....and it’s on the part of the old McClellan AFB still controlled by the military, and security is provided by the US Air Force.