Nuclear Info Kept From Congress and the Public 309
Thermite writes "On March 6, 2006 an accident occurred at Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee. According to reports, almost 9 gallons of highly enriched uranium in solution spilled and nearly went into a chain reaction. Before the accident in 2004, the NRC and The Office of Naval Reactors had changed the terms of the company's license so that any correspondence with Nuclear Fuel Services would be marked 'official use only.' From the article: 'While reviewing the commission's public Web page in 2004, the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors found what it considered protected information about Nuclear Fuel Service's work for the Navy. The commission responded by sealing every document related to Nuclear Fuel Services and BWX Technologies in Lynchburg, Va., the only two companies licensed by the agency to manufacture, possess and store highly enriched uranium.' The result was that the public and Congress were both left in the dark for 13 months regarding this accident and other issues at the facility."
Yes, we should (Score:4, Interesting)
Second most serious violation (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the Risk of Privatization (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/
Fissionables in solution are weird. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the "spill" makes it more likely, not less likely.
Fissionables in solution are tricky things to deal with. Consider the following four cases:
1) Homer Simpson drops a subcritical hunk of a water-soluble U235 salt into a swimming pool. No big deal. It's a single subcritical mass of U235, and the neutrons fly straight out of it and into the surrounding water, and not enough bounce back into the mass to present a problem. Homer reaches in with a net, and pulls the chunk of salt out of the net. "No problemo."
2) A little while later, as the harmless chunk dissolves into the huge pool, there will be localized spots near the chunk, with both sufficiently-high concentration of fissionable materials and the right amount of moderating material between them for a criticality incident. "D'OH!"
3) "Aha! I'm smart! I'll prevent that scenario by dissolving it, a bit at a time, by adding it to the pool by using a salt shaker near the pump intake!" Congrats! The U235 atoms are, at all times, sufficiently widely-dispersed, that there is no criticality risk. "Woohoo!"
4) A few weeks after your swim, the place is shut down and everyone gets fired. The maintenance guy forgets to drain the pool. The water gradually evaporates, and concentrations in the remaining water begin to rise... and a few years later, some guy spraying graffiti by the abandoned poolhouse wonders WTF that blue flash was. "D'OH!" again.
I'm on a roll here, so I may as well close off the "security by obscurity" issue. There are places where security by obscurity works, and this is one of them.
The deal here is that criticality incidents, especially involving fissionables in solution are a function of degree of enrichment (in the case of uranium as the solute), nuclear properties of the solvent, local concentrations of the ions in solution, and a whole boatload of other things, in order to build cool toys, you often have to deal with them all, simultaneously. I'm not in the building-of-cool-toys industry, and have mercifully I've never had a need to know.
Some of these things are public domain, but others (particularly those things pertaining to the design of shipborne Naval reactors, which use HEU because there simply isn't enough space on all types of ships to permit the use of LEU-based designs) are classified. Given a description of an incident, however, it may be possible to place upper and lower bounds on some of the classified parameters - bounds that are narrower than the published numbers, and there are plenty of adversaries who would be delighted to deduce things about our Naval capabilities (a lot more interesting/useful than even our bomb designs), given just a few more missing puzzle pieces. The math is hard, and denying adversaries the pieces of the puzzle that they can use to derive the whole picture isn't security by obscurity, it's just good security practice.
Re:Fissionables in solution are weird. (Score:3, Interesting)
Call me naive but I have a vision of this sort of operation that involves a bit more vigilance. Leaks can be automatically detected, particularly leaks of highly radioactive matter. In my HEU refining facility 14 different models of klaxons, 3 of them steam powered, simultaneously deafen the entire facility the instant a pressure drop or burst of radiation is detected. The two backup NRC guys are physically pulled out of bed and sent to join the already on-site NRC guy within 30 minutes.
Your instinct may be that this is impractical; abnormal things would cause false alarms so frequently they would be ignored. I expect something more; making HEU should be on par with maneuvering in orbit. I don't care if it costs a lot. Little rivers of HEU should not be cascading down elevator shafts. Ever. If the Navy and its contractors can't afford it then stop fucking around with it.
Re:Congress Isn't for Everyone (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, lets suppose for an instance that your characterization of Republicans was true (all Republicans mind you, not just the Republican politicians). As Lenin would say "What is to be done?". How would you go about fixing the situation? I mean, fix it in such a way as to keep the Republic which you and your fellow Democrats so obviously cherish so much intact?
Re:Congress Isn't for Everyone (Score:3, Interesting)
First you kick off a rant with some Republican denial projection, that "Democrats are detached from reality" (complete with a stupid Republican slander word). Then you wallow in some extreme strawman you made up that reveals what is in your mind - but claim someone actually accused you of it; more denial projection. You get to jerk off to your sick fantasies while blaming them on someone else.
Then you quote Lenin, and say "so what are you going to do about it?"
What I'm doing is easily exposing your insanity. In public, where others can easily see how far gone you are. You are a lost cause, since you're still hiding in your faithy Republican worship after all everyone has seen. But you're such a good example of Republican character defects that parading you in public is worth the distasteful time spent prodding you into your distinctive screech. Because not just the pure politics that is your sole obsession is at stake. As we're discussing, your Republicans are so demented that when your crony contractors spill nuclear material and lie about it, somehow Democrats are at fault.
Re:This seems a little overblown. (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the details of the delivery dates, times, routes and security guards is sensitive, but the quantities of nuclear fuel being used by the Navy doesn't seem to me to tell anybody anything much that's strategically sensitive - refuelling happens so rarely that it doesn't have much to do with strategic situations. Frankly, information about what the Navy is doing with diesel would be far more revealing than what they're doing with uranium.