Radiation-eating vampire

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

In some ways attacking the NAS would be easier.

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.)

And of course they all have the usual problem of forces like this, which is that there are approximately zero real threats, so even with the best will in the world they get complacent. In the military you can fix that to some extent with intense training.

And again, they don't know what an actual attack would look like. They can plan for what they think the bad guys might do, but chances are if it happens they'll do something else.

Remember Y-12 in 2012 (a DoE uranium enrichment facility run by a private contractor). If any of those people had actually wanted to get at the HEU, they wouldn't have had any problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-12_N...clear_protests

Some of the first-hand accounts and incident reports I found while doing research for Meltdown & Fallout were frankly terrifying, and if I can find them so can bad guys. But for reasons which should be obvious I'm not going to cite my sources.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

... 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.

[DAT]

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.

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).

[tanksoldier]

. 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.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

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.

Yeah. They are concerned with someone driving out with a truckload of the stuff. Not someone sneaking in and taking a swim in the pool.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

[Flyndaran]

The very last sentence of that link mentions how someone would be shot long before they reached the pool regardless of intent.

[tanksoldier]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

The very last sentence of that link mentions how someone would be shot long before they reached the pool regardless of intent.

Also true. They aren’t going to worry about why you’re trying to penetrate security, just that you are. The why can come later.

Even a relatively low security civilian facility is going to start shooting long before you get anywhere important.

[RogerBW]

The level of actual security seems to depend on whom you listen to, the proud guys getting ready for an attack or the embarrassed guys writing the reports afterwards on how it all went wrong - which means that for gaming purposes the level of security can be anything the GM chooses to set. :)

[L.J.Steele]

Related question: I know there are radiation detectors in and around cities looking for accidents, dirty bomb materials, etc., and I'd expect San Diego to have a decent network of them given major port, major military base, and on the border. Are the sensors likely to react to exceeding a threshold, or react if the expected level drops, or both?

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by L.J.Steele

Related question: I know there are radiation detectors in and around cities looking for accidents, dirty bomb materials, etc., and I'd expect San Diego to have a decent network of them given major port, major military base, and on the border. Are the sensors likely to react to exceeding a threshold, or react if the expected level drops, or both?

The ones I know a bit about are the portal scanners, and those are very simple: trigger when count/second is over the set threshold. A drop might be noticed by an alert operator, but it wouldn't ring alarm bells, and operators don't need to be alert to get the main job done.

I suspect it'll depend on budget and sophistication - a smart system would interpret a drop as a sensor failure, and flag it up for maintenance. Looking at e.g. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-08-23 I think budget was a major consideration, so my guess is this is something that shows up at the end of the day when you change the batteries and check that they're still working… if the low-radiation situation is still persisting at that point.