Radioactive mystery box
One of the trickiest, most challenging and most rewarding stories I’ve done in a while is out in the November issue of Wired. In April, I spent a week in Genoa, Italy, trying to find out why a highly radioactive container had been delivered to the port there — and why it was still sitting on the dock more than a year later.
The story, “Mystery Box,” is a peek into the fast-moving, anonymized world of containerized shipping and the risks it holds. The key question facing officials in Genoa: What do you do with a container that’s too radioactive to open, too risky to move and already on Italian soil? It isn’t hard to imagine the scenario repeating itself at ports in Newark or Los Angeles, and the experts I talked to said US officials aren’t exactly on top of evacuation and contingency planning.
I could have written another whole article on the subject of loose radioactive material and dirty bombs, and perhaps some day I will, but in the meantime I’m relieved the story ended as well as it did. In a strange twist, the radioactive source material ended up in Leipzig, Germany, where I spend quite a bit of time.
The piece has already been picked up by Longform.org and I’ve gotten lots of good initial feedback. Check it out and see what you think.
