Brit Plant Has Lost Weapons-Grade Uranium
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Brit Plant Has Lost Weapons-Grade Uranium
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Scotsman.com - 9 February 2006
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id 3132006
Dounreay 'loses' bomb-grade uranium
By JAMES KIRKUP
THE Dounreay nuclear plant has lost more than half a pound of highly
enriched uranium (HEU), the material used to make nuclear weapons.
Official government figures show that during an internal audit of UK
nuclear sites over the last year, technicians at the Caithness site
could not account for some 283g of HEU.
Another nuclear plant, Winfrith in Dorset, has also mislaid some HEU,
the audit found.
The material is at the heart of the crisis over Iran's nuclear
ambitions. Intense diplomatic efforts by western nations and the United
Nations are focused on stopping the Iranian government producing HEU in
its nuclear power programme.
The discrepancies in stores of radioactive material were revealed in the
Department of Trade and Industry's annual Nuclear Materials Balance
survey.
The audit has previously shown even larger gaps in the nuclear
balance-sheet. Last year, the Sellafield plant in Cumbria could not
account for more than 30kg of plutonium.
The government insists that the missing material is not a cause for
concern, trying to depict it as "paper losses".
"Whenever nuclear material is measured there is an uncertainty
associated with the measurement," the DTI said. The losses at Dounreay
and other plans "conform to the pattern over previous years and give no
rise to concern over either the safety or the security of the operation
of the plants".
However, as the DTI admits in a briefing document on the findings, the
audit process leaves open the possibility that the "lost" material is
physically missing. "Theft of small amounts of material cannot be
detected by nuclear materials accountancy alone," the document says.
Frank Barnaby, a former government nuclear scientist who now works at
the Oxford Research Group, a think-tank, said that the uncertainty
"should worry us very much".
He said: "The fact is that they can't tell whether the material within
these 'unaccounted for' margins is missing or has been stolen - there is
no certainty at all about where this material is."
While the amount of missing uranium would not be enough for a
conventional nuclear device, it could be used in a "dirty bomb", in
which a conventional explosive blast is used to scatter radioactive
particles.
Security experts also fear that uncertainties within the nuclear system
can complicate intelligence efforts against terrorist groups. Because
the government cannot say precisely how much material is in UK plants,
intelligence analysts cannot discount claims that some could have fallen
into the wrong hands.
The latest confirmation of the inherent uncertainty in nuclear power
generation comes as ministers consider authorising the building of a new
generation of nuclear plants.
Yesterday, Nirex, the body in charge of finding a solution for the safe
storage of Britain's nuclear waste, said it could take until 2040 before
a permanent solution is pushed through.
Chris Murray, the chief executive of Nirex, told a committee of Lords
that 2025 would be the earliest that the waste could be buried in deep
storage depositories and then only if communities volunteered to take
it.
The Scottish Executive is refusing to back a new generation of reactors
until the waste problem is resolved.
*
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