Maybe we're doing a better job of monitoring for nukes domestically than I thought. A woman was pulled over in her SUV for being radioactive:

"These are very sensitive devices," Seymour said, adding that some officers have reported them going off in buildings "because someone in the next room on the other side of the wall had a stress test."

Doctors said they have heard of radiation sensors going off at nuclear plants after patients have had stress tests, but not along highways...

..."Nobody at my doctor's office warned me this could happen," the woman said she told the officer. "He said, `That's because they don't know.'"

Don't pay off your credit cards, either. Might be suspicious.

http://jfrancislehman.blog$pot.com/2006/03/that-harmless-and-neccessary-patriot.html

(Andrew Sullivan has a working link)

Mailing in a 6 thousand dollar check instead of your normal payment is radically different and thus "suspicious".

Was the guy arrested? Harassed by the state? Subjected to any more inconvenience than his check not clearing as fast as he wanted?

Nope.

He might be concerned with "rights" being lost, but I don't recall ever thinking I had a right to not have the state be interested enough to look at a sudden and drastic change in financial activity.

Actually she should have been informed. This issue was discussed extensively for the past couple years at RSNA (Radiological Society of North America). It is a serious problem. Any physician in this field should have known, informed her of the risks, and provided adequate explanatory documentation.

Homeland security has been fairly uncooperative and local law enforcement generally ignorant of the extent to which people, pets, and machines are noticably radioactive as a result of normal medical procedures. This story illustrates just how stubbornly they have held to their ignorance despite the best efforts of the medical community to inform them. They didn't even listen to their colleagues in New York (right next door) who have had repeated experiences just like this.

The general hysteria and panic around terrorists and radioactivity don't help. Everyone involved seems to turn off their brain and go into ultimate stupid mode when they hear either of those two words.

"This story illustrates just how stubbornly they have held to their ignorance despite the best efforts of the medical community to inform them."

Really? How does it illustrate that? From the story I read, the woman was asked a few questions, they verified that she had no wants or warrants, believed her story about the stress test, and she was on her way. How is that stubborn or ignorant on their part?

Why should authorities ignore someone that sets off a radiation detector just because they look like a "soccer mom in a minivan"? Seems to me that's a recipe for inviting people to transport illegal goods by way of soccer moms in minivans.

It's happened with cat poop, too. Since I can't leave a comment with a link to Bl*gSp*t in it -- nothing personal, I'm sure -- just graze on over to Arcturus and read the entry for October 26, 2002, tellingly entitled "Radioactive Cat Excrement."

The stupidity is getting a super sensitive detector with no proper screening and using it in locations where there will be a high probability of false positives. There are several quotes about being surprised and not expecting detection from a car. About 0.1% of the public is radioactive at any given time. False alarms like this are not new, despite the surprise in the quotes from the boneheads who made the decisions.

These detectors are designed for an entirely different purpose: checking cargo and alerting for biohazards at fires and accidents. They are super sensitive and extremely poor isotope discriminators. That's OK for their design use, because those are situations where clearing a false positive has minimal inconveniences, and false positives are far less likely.

Using these in roving checks of public traffic means a high level of false alarms that is an unnecessary inconvenience to the public and a complete waste of law enforcement resources. It would be more productive and provide better protection against terrorism to assign the law enforcement resources to doing public workouts instead. At least that would be improving their health.

Screening for improper use of radioactives is not something to be done with ultrasensitive detectors. There are a huge number of entirely legitimate uses of radioactive materials. Just a little bit more sensitive and it will start alarming for every house with an old design smoke detector.

I suppose that if one is truly malicious, one might go to someplace like Telluride, CO, and load up on the slightly radioactive stuff that is around. Then drive your truck down your own highway and let the stuff seep out. Aren't some of Vermont's granites fairly radioactive?

In the 1960s I worked on the early stages of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy. Once it entered the medical diagnostic field, the name had to be changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging because of the great fear that rjh mentioned.

The stupidity is getting a super sensitive detector with no proper screening and using it in locations where there will be a high probability of false positives.

Why is this stupid? A large rate of false positives was likely expected and tolerated, since the cost of a false positive is very much lower than the cost of a false negative. In such a situation, you want a lot of false positives, or else your detector is too insensitive.

False positives (in identifying levels of radioactivity as being high enough to warrant checking) result in minor inconvenience for some of the people who have recently had stress tests, a fraction of a fraction of the population as a whole.

A false negative would result in a major city being replaced by a radioactive crater.

Absolutely, we should be using this technology to minimize false negatives, and worry about false positives not at all.