Story Archive

Why Worry

In May, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined Idaho State University $8,500 over a coin sized bit of plutonium on loan from the Idaho National Laboratory it had lost, and not promptly reported. But in March 2017, INL security experts left some plutonium in the their car outside a San Antonio, Texas, hotel. The plutonium was stolen. What happened to the security experts? A month later, one received an award. “Their achievements, and those of their colleagues at the laboratory, are the reasons our fellow citizens look to INL to resolve the nation’s big energy and security challenges,” said a press release at the time. As for the plutonium, it’s still what’s known as MUF — “material unaccounted for.” And while officials say the amount wasn’t enough to worry about, it’s not the only missing “material”: it joins six tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Most MUF is thought to be stuck in pipes or filters, or “lost” in accounting goofs, but a 2009 report by the Energy Department’s Inspector General mentioned 45 pounds of the military’s enriched uranium “loaned out” or listed as stored is actually missing. There hasn’t been a similar report since. It takes nine pounds of uranium to make a bomb. (AC/San Antonio Express News) ...But if the public doesn’t know it’s missing, the government can’t be held accountable.