Even if the firefighters did take Geiger counters with them, they didn't release the data from it, and James Woosley, our former CIA chief, was an "anti-terrorism consultant" to this fire department and apparently issued gag orders for certain subjects. The control of information around the events in Manhattan and at the Pentagon was virtually air-tight. Most of the really revealing stuff came from official sources, though there were some valuable eyewitness testimonies. The official testimonies of the fire fighters have lots of interesting information, like elevator banks servicing only the lower floors and basements being blown out at lobby-level when they first arrived, leading people to think that the basement had been bombed again like in 1993. Other than the few exceptions there was strict control on everything from the handling of the physical debris to a ban on any cameras at the clean-up site.
Also unless it 60 kg of uranium or plutonium was blown everywhere like the bombs dropped on Japan did, there's no reason to expect a lot of residual radiation. We could debate whether or not it's possible to achieve more efficient reactions, for example 95% or upwards of the material being converted straight to energy, with no lower limit on the amount of radioactive material required (supposedly the US military declared it impossible and stopped trying, despite theoretical breakthroughs in public universities). Only about 1% of the radioactive material in the bombs used on Japan was converted to energy, and the rest was intact and still highly radioactive uranium or plutonium scattered everywhere. But if it were indeed possible to get those higher efficiencies, after 50+ years and trillions of dollars of research, then you would not see anywhere near the same residual radiation for a much larger blast. Efficiency like that would mean not only less residual radiation but much less radioactive material needed for an equivalent blast to begin with.
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Originally posted by Dreamtimer
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