Posted by
michael
on from the just-had-it-a-minute-ago dept.
jyuter writes "Apparently, Japan has lost 206kg of plutonium, enough to make 25 nuclear bombs. The official position is that it's not stolen, just 'unaccounted for.'"
58 comments
Buy it back
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Funny
One bomb costs 1 million dollars, why don't they buy it back? Shouldn't be much of a dent in the budget of a land like Japan.
Re:Buy it back
by
Simon+Field
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Does it bother anyone that most of the the
missing plutonium is thought to have been lost in
the waste water and "dissolved in other elements"?
It is bad enough that the waste is radioactive.
But plutonium is also very poisonous.
If the controls on the plutonium itself have 3%
error rates, how about the controls on the waste?
There was an interesting quote in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash about the Yakuza. When the main character, Hiro Protagonist, was thinking of joining them, some representatives from the Mafia said, "You never hear the Mafia described as the Sicicilian Yakuza"
-- Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
There are a number of issues with this article. First of all, the only thing they are going on seems to be that they are 3% short of the estimated amount of plutonium.
I recall that there have been issues in the past with Japan's nuclear plants, so why is this any surprise?
Exactly. The article mentions that discrepancies of 1% are normal as the plutonium is in liquid form and can easily be dissolved in other substances. 3% is a bit higher than usual, but could still just be an error in the estimate.
Also, Japanese authorities estimated that 120 of the 206 kg were lost to the usual processing losses, leaving only 86 kg that are really missing. That's just about 1% of the total expected amount. A bad estimate seems to be the most reasonable explanation.
Flux copacitors, Lybians, and Time Machines
by
Mick+D.
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Boy are those terrorists going to be upset when they realize the nuclear bombs they wanted were really made of used pinball machine parts.
And you only need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts to power the flux copacitor, besides, if you are going to build a time machine you might as well do it with style.:)
--
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
Re:Flux copacitors, Lybians, and Time Machines
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Ummm...not to nitpick, but that's 1.21 jigawatts.
On the plus side, if we just stake out the twin pines mall (or lone pine mall, if we arrive too late), it should be pretty easy to recover.
Re:Flux copacitors, Lybians, and Time Machines
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
No, its 1.21 Gigawatts, jigawatts being the correct pronunciation thereof.
The obvious answer
by
blacklite001
·
· Score: 2, Funny
They're using it to power their army of giant robots to take over the earth.
Duh.
Lessee - where might it be?
by
0x69
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"Dear N. Korea, If the mere 1/5 ton of Pu that we leaked was "missing" doesn't clue you in, please rest assured that you'll bitterly regret any nuclear mistakes in our direction. Your loving neighbor, Japan"
In other news, scientists have discovered a new species of glow-in-the-dark fish near the Oopsiliki Nuclear Facility...
Auditers caught 'em half-way between using fudged-upward numbers (to make productivity look good) and fudged-back-down numbers (to account for what actually ships). (This kind of stuff has happened in the U.S.A.)
Measuring & accounting so sloppy that there's no way to tell if the "missing" stuff ever existed...or if much more is missing.
Stolen by __________, who then did ___________with it
It's an off-the-books loan to CowboyNeal.
-- It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Re:Lessee - where might it be?
by
manofherb
·
· Score: 1
all i have to say is that they will never nuke us as they rely on our pop culture too much to make money, in other terms they are our bitch, maybe even our fall guy?
Not feelng much better.
by
sporty
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The official position is that it's not stolen, just 'unaccounted for'
Wait.. lemme get this right.
It's either not a problem since it's just somewhere around, like your car keys
or
It's like someone car keys, someone else took it out for a ride, but we don't know who and if it is ok.
*boggle*
--
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Those damn gnomes...
by
imsmith
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
...you can't trust gnomes, they are all out to get you, hiding your keys, eating your socks, stealing your plutonium.
Some say they are good and just being bullied and pressured to do bad by the leprechauns, but don't be fooled by this pro-gnome propaganda. We are freedom loving people who will not be held hostages to mythical wee creatures and fairy folk with weapons of mass destruction.
The gnomes must disarm or, for the safety of peace-loving everywhere, we will disarm them - and if they are still a threat, we will disleg them and debone them.
Re:Those damn gnomes...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
You mean gremlins not gnomes
Re:Those damn gnomes...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
-- A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
It's obvious what happened
by
GuyMannDude
·
· Score: 3, Funny
C'mon people, this is Japan we're talking about here. The most realistic answer is that Godzilla ate more plutonium than they realized on his last ramage across Japan. Since he attacks Japan so damn often, it's not surprising that their inventory counts get off once in awhile. Just relax, everyone. Everyone knows Godzilla only attacks Japan. The rest of us don't really have to worry.
Re:It's obvious what happened
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Unless the bugger mutates and heads to New York to nest in Madison Square Garden.
Re:It's obvious what happened
by
Grendol
·
· Score: 1
I never really understood the "Butterfly Effect" until I saw Godzilla vs Mothra. That explained alot. With a butterfly effect on that magnitude 206 kg of unaccounted for Pu is kinda miniscule
The Sky is falling
by
Yokaze
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Since a non-neglectable percentage of the readership tends to skip reading the article, and the poster suggest a major mishap, I feel obliged to post a summary:
There is a large discrepancy between the projected output and the registered amount of output.
Partly, this is considered to be due to some less dramatic unaccounted ways of leaving the factory than through the hands of north-korean spies, like dillution in waste-waters and diffusion into other materials.
There is still a large amount left, which cannot have left the factory by these means. Still, it is most likely not 'lost', since it might have not been produced at all. It is a discrepancy between actual and projected numbers.
These discrepancies do always occur since no measurement is perfect. An error margin of 1% can be attributed to the measurement alone. The factory had a discrepancy of 3%.
Both numbers aren't very reassuring. But actually, I'm more afraid of the things that aren't reported.
-- "Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
The issue is not that there is a 3% error - as you say there a lot of problems over accounting. The problem is that it seems to have taken place over a long period. This implies that day to day accounting may not be quite what it should be.
Before, I have heard about 10Kg to 20Kg discrepencies happening elsewhere (Sellafield/Windscale) but never 200Kg.
their government has it
by
zogger
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
--although they as the recipient of the only nukes used in anger have a "public" position of being 'against" nuclear weaponry, it strains the bounds of credulity that they don't have their own weapons. Of course they do, I've taken that as a gimmee for a long time now. A nation that large, and with their level of technology simply has to have built last ditch contingency weapons, they have no choice in the matter.
Re:their government has it
by
FurryFeet
·
· Score: 1
If they had nuclear weapons, they'd have to let the world know; otherwise, they're useless (unless you are of an unusually revengful nature). In the words of the immortal Dr. Strangelove: "Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world?".
You really do want them to have it.
by
kippy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even if Japan is on the level, some of their neighbors are not.
I'd much rather like Japan to know where it is rather than not because of the fact that they are on the level.
I had to, um...."borrow" it so that I can get back to the year 1985.
-- Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
And soon you will be able to buy it....
by
hawkbug
·
· Score: 1
Tomorrow, you'll see it for sale on Ebay. It would be a good, what, 4 or 5 hours before the good ol' Ebay sensor staff realizes it and takes it down. Plenty of time for it to switch hands!
plutonium is THE most toxic artifical substance on planet earth
'Cause, you know, now elements are artificial... I mean, granted, there are only "traces of plutonium compounds in our natural environment," and most PU comes from engineering U-238, but I still wouldn't go so far as to call it "artificial."
Ignore me, I just like to nit-pick.
Plutonium is twice as heavy as lead, among other properties. If we mean that the Pu decayed into lead, maybe the decay products are more complex. Of course, a chunk of Pu would take hundreds of thousands of years to (mostly) stabilize.
What they were able to account for:
by
Schroedinger
·
· Score: 4, Funny
In its place they found a mixture of green dish detergent and some glitter.
Re:What they were able to account for:
by
Lurch+Kimded
·
· Score: 1
Ah, a collection of "purest green", where upon they can craft it into a most enviable brooch which they may wear and we will all be amazed by its glory............ or not.
--
How can you say that civilisation's do not advance... in every war we invent new ways to kill you.
If everyone on slashdot were to go sell plutonium
on ebay....
Tonnes are "missing" in the U.S.
by
radtea
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Tonnes of plutonium are "missing" in the U.S. for pretty much the same reason. Process accounting is just not all that accurate, and keeping track of things at the 1% level means that there's lots of opportunity for error.
All this story is saying that that the measured amount is 3% lower than the estimated amount, and for anyone who has ever tried to calculate the results of a complex process with an accuracy of 1%, this is not a big surprise.
On the other hand, these sorts of "accounting losses" do provide an opportunity for terrorists to get their hands on the stuff secretly. This is very much like "coin clipping" back in the days when money was made out of gold or silver--get a coin, pare a bit off the edge, pass it on at face value, and eventually you've enhanced your wealth by a significant amount. Milling of coin edges was introduced to prevent this practice, with indifferent success.
Unfortunately, there's no practical defense against this kind of thing, which should make us just a little leary about the prospects of "peaceful" nuclear power. My own attitude is "nuclear power if necessary, but not necessarily nuclear power."
Everything I know I learned from SFII
by
InadequateCamel
·
· Score: 1
C'mon, think...in every arcade fighting game you have EVER played, what can every single token Japanese character do?
Throw super-fireballs and energy beams from their hands, that's what!
We already know that every single one of the Japanese are fluent in martial arts, but now it appears that the the Japanese goverment is using plutonium to convert their entire population into kung-fu-kickin', fireball-flickin' seizure-inducing ninja supersoldiers!
Shit I'd steal plutonium given the opportunity
by
A55M0NKEY
·
· Score: 1
I'd put it in a box and bury it in the woods for 'just in case'. Plus it would be cool to have some 'just to have', in the same way it would be kewl to have an imperial star cruiser toy. If I had some plutonium ( like enough for a bomb, it might be cool to put it in some water and have the Cerenkerovov ( sp ) radiation as a nite-light in my room.
If I had plutonium I'd paint it with that stuff thy use to put the plastic grips on tools so it wouldn't make no dust or get on my skin, and toss it to my friends. It would be so funny when they caught a tiny 7 kg slug and dropped it ( have to make sure 7kg won't chain react and make too much radiation ) maybe use less, than 7 kg but isn't that the 1/7 the size of a soda can, but it would be kewl to amaze your friends with the wieght of your 'lump of lead'
If I had plutonium I'd try to make a bomb out of it. Then I'd take it to the desert and blow it up. If it went off that would frikken ROCK. I always wanted to see on of them suckers go off. I'd do it on the 4th of july and invite some friends to have a bonfire and like a 30 pack of Natural Ice. They ought to blow up a nuke in the desert every year on the 4th of July so ppl can party in the desert around the perimeter. That would be kewl.
--
Eat at Joe's.
Re:Shit I'd steal plutonium given the opportunity
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Don't forget that you could grind a little bit up and sniff it with your crack.
While it is possible that somebody has smuggled away the plutonium, but this wasn't plutonium that was sitting around - it's an amount expected to be "extracted" from the processing of used nuclear fuel.
Makes it a bit tricky to track though, either they have a process that's inefficient, or somebody with sticky (and now possibly glowing) fingers.
Realistically, N. Korea can supposedly make their own nuclear material with the reactor they're revving up, so it probably hasn't been snitched by them. One would think that if anyone took it, they could trace the radiation signature though... this stuff probably leaves some time of trail.
These discrepancies do always occur since no measurement is perfect. An error margin of 1% can be attributed to the measurement alone. The factory had a discrepancy of 3%.
If banks advertised regular "it's no big deal" accounting errors of +-3% in large bills and bearer bonds, I imagine you'd see a lot more embezzlement than you do today.
...In other news, officials at The Pacific Nuclear Research Facility have denied the rumor that the case of missing plutonium was in fact stolen from their vault two weeks ago. A Libyan terrorist group had claimed responsibility for the alleged theft, however, the officials now infer the crepency to a simple clerical error. The FBI...
There is a large difference between banks and physical applications. Banks work with exact numbers, when you measure you don't. You calculate with unexact values.
The rest is stochastics and theory of errors, which I'm probably not qualified enough to lecture about. Suffice to say, that the probability you have the exact value is practically zero.
The error margin, or more positively formulated, the confidence interval, describes the region in which the real value lies with a probability of 66% (Gaussian-distribution). An interval twice as large gives you 95% certainty.
Lastly, what I tried to emphasise in my summary: It is not a discrepancy between the real value and the accounted value, but between an expected value and the registered amount.
-- "Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
"This is an unusually large amount of plutonium to be unaccounted for, which makes me uncomfortable, although I think it's highly unlikely that it was stolen," said Tatsujiro Suzuki, senior research scientist at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry.
and...
The ministry admitted it was baffled by the remaining 86kg of absent plutonium, but insisted it was "not missing". Initial projections for plutonium output might have been too high and the missing amount might never have been produced, the ministry said.
So essentially, the experts express their discomfort with the figures but say that they're "pretty sure" the Plutonium couldn't have been stolen (based only on the plant managers' evaluation of plant security, which might not be the most objective measure). And you express that with the blanket assertion that the Plutonium "cannot have left the factory by these means."
There is a large difference between banks and physical applications.
Banks work with exact numbers, when you measure you don't. You calculate with unexact values.
1. Clearly if they failed to notice the discrepancies until they reached 206kg, so there must not have been a lot of day-to-day measurement. One assumes that they would have adjusted their predictions prior to this point if they were consistently seeing less output than expected.
2. In the absence of such day-to-day measurement I stand by my point. If someone had the opportunity to embezzle several kg of plutonium, there would be a reasonable chance that the plant managers would never find out (if they did find out, they could sound the alarm to the authorities, investigate their workers, etc.) So there's essentially one less line of security between the plant and potential purchasers than I'm comfortable with.
The plant security may be more than adequate. But if anyone can find a way to penetrate that security and hijack some Plutonium, this plant has advertised a huge vulnerability.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to scream at the breeder reactor advocates. We can't seem to keep track of the relatively small amount of Plutonium that we generate. Imagine if we move to a Plutonium-economy and have to ship the stuff from place to place.
..here's another. Israel has never confirmed they have nukes. Do you doubt they have them?
There's a world "official" list of nuke kaboom owners, then there's reality. I imagine there's at least a few more nations possess them then what let on publically and officially.
Obviously I can't *prove* japan has nukes, but I'd wager a significant sum on it without hesitation. The closest I've seen them come to admitting it was a statement by one of their defense guys a few months ago (sorry no link handy) about how fast and how hard they could respond to an attack. The expertise is more than there, they possess the plutonium now some large amount is "lost", and they were working on their own bomb in the 40's and might have made it had they started sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
One bomb costs 1 million dollars, why don't they buy it back? Shouldn't be much of a dent in the budget of a land like Japan.
"I didn't lose my virginity, it's just unaccounted for."
206kg of lead was found where the plutonioum was last believed to have been.
--Shemnon
nope, not there.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If it were a country other than Japan I might be more concerned, but in this case I think they are on the level. Still, it is a serious error.
Perhaps you haven't heard about the Yakuza.
There are a number of issues with this article. First of all, the only thing they are going on seems to be that they are 3% short of the estimated amount of plutonium.
I recall that there have been issues in the past with Japan's nuclear plants, so why is this any surprise?
Boy are those terrorists going to be upset when they realize the nuclear bombs they wanted were really made of used pinball machine parts.
:)
And you only need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts to power the flux copacitor, besides, if you are going to build a time machine you might as well do it with style.
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
They're using it to power their army of giant robots to take over the earth.
Duh.
"Dear N. Korea,
If the mere 1/5 ton of Pu that we leaked was "missing" doesn't clue you in, please rest assured that you'll bitterly regret any nuclear mistakes in our direction.
Your loving neighbor,
Japan"
In other news, scientists have discovered a new species of glow-in-the-dark fish near the Oopsiliki Nuclear Facility...
Auditers caught 'em half-way between using fudged-upward numbers (to make productivity look good) and fudged-back-down numbers (to account for what actually ships). (This kind of stuff has happened in the U.S.A.)
Measuring & accounting so sloppy that there's no way to tell if the "missing" stuff ever existed...or if much more is missing.
Stolen by __________, who then did ___________with it
It's an off-the-books loan to CowboyNeal.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Wait.. lemme get this right.
It's either not a problem since it's just somewhere around, like your car keys
or
It's like someone car keys, someone else took it out for a ride, but we don't know who and if it is ok.
*boggle*
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Some say they are good and just being bullied and pressured to do bad by the leprechauns, but don't be fooled by this pro-gnome propaganda. We are freedom loving people who will not be held hostages to mythical wee creatures and fairy folk with weapons of mass destruction.
The gnomes must disarm or, for the safety of peace-loving everywhere, we will disarm them - and if they are still a threat, we will disleg them and debone them.
"Have they looked down the back of the sofa?"
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
C'mon people, this is Japan we're talking about here. The most realistic answer is that Godzilla ate more plutonium than they realized on his last ramage across Japan. Since he attacks Japan so damn often, it's not surprising that their inventory counts get off once in awhile. Just relax, everyone. Everyone knows Godzilla only attacks Japan. The rest of us don't really have to worry.
GMD
watch this
Since a non-neglectable percentage of the readership tends to skip reading the article,
and the poster suggest a major mishap, I feel obliged to post a summary:
There is a large discrepancy between the projected
output and the registered amount of output.
Partly, this is considered to be due to some less dramatic unaccounted ways of
leaving the factory than through the hands of north-korean spies, like dillution in waste-waters and diffusion into other
materials.
There is still a large amount left, which cannot have left the factory by these means.
Still, it is most likely not 'lost', since it might have not been produced at all.
It is a discrepancy between actual and projected numbers.
These discrepancies do always occur since no measurement is perfect. An error margin of 1% can be attributed to the measurement alone. The factory had a discrepancy of 3%.
Both numbers aren't very reassuring. But actually, I'm more afraid of the things that aren't reported.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
--although they as the recipient of the only nukes used in anger have a "public" position of being 'against" nuclear weaponry, it strains the bounds of credulity that they don't have their own weapons. Of course they do, I've taken that as a gimmee for a long time now. A nation that large, and with their level of technology simply has to have built last ditch contingency weapons, they have no choice in the matter.
Even if Japan is on the level, some of their neighbors are not.
I'd much rather like Japan to know where it is rather than not because of the fact that they are on the level.
Blaze a trail to the New World
I had to, um...."borrow" it so that I can get back to the year 1985.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Tomorrow, you'll see it for sale on Ebay. It would be a good, what, 4 or 5 hours before the good ol' Ebay sensor staff realizes it and takes it down. Plenty of time for it to switch hands!
And it will be used to make one Hell of a KatoffleKannon (sp?) or Potato Gun or whatever.
I do find it odd though that missing Plutonium makes the science Pages and Kotoflekannon (sp) made the main page.
Priorities I guess
D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
... a case of unscented soap is unaccounted for at a local Stop & Shop.
Local authorities suspect the synthesis of chemical weapons, including nitroglycerin. Homeland Security has been alerted.
Christ, give me a break.
Let's assume that the plutonium actually is just scattered here & there, processing losses, accidental disposal, etc., and not talk about bombs.
Per pound, plutonium is THE most toxic artifical substance on planet earth (botulism is the most toxic natural substance).
One pound of plutonium, finely ground and inhaled, can kill 42 billion people. That is to say, inhaling 10 nanograms of plutonium will kill you.
They should find the plutonium, and quick. Shouldn't be too hard, it's very radioactive.
Keeping in with the theme of the topic...
I stick to walls...
Plutonium is twice as heavy as lead, among other properties. If we mean that the Pu decayed into lead, maybe the decay products are more complex. Of course, a chunk of Pu would take hundreds of thousands of years to (mostly) stabilize.
In its place they found a mixture of green dish detergent and some glitter.
If everyone on slashdot were to go sell plutonium on ebay....
Tonnes of plutonium are "missing" in the U.S. for pretty much the same reason. Process accounting is just not all that accurate, and keeping track of things at the 1% level means that there's lots of opportunity for error.
All this story is saying that that the measured amount is 3% lower than the estimated amount, and for anyone who has ever tried to calculate the results of a complex process with an accuracy of 1%, this is not a big surprise.
On the other hand, these sorts of "accounting losses" do provide an opportunity for terrorists to get their hands on the stuff secretly. This is very much like "coin clipping" back in the days when money was made out of gold or silver--get a coin, pare a bit off the edge, pass it on at face value, and eventually you've enhanced your wealth by a significant amount. Milling of coin edges was introduced to prevent this practice, with indifferent success.
Unfortunately, there's no practical defense against this kind of thing, which should make us just a little leary about the prospects of "peaceful" nuclear power. My own attitude is "nuclear power if necessary, but not necessarily nuclear power."
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
C'mon, think...in every arcade fighting game you have EVER played, what can every single token Japanese character do?
Throw super-fireballs and energy beams from their hands, that's what!
We already know that every single one of the Japanese are fluent in martial arts, but now it appears that the the Japanese goverment is using plutonium to convert their entire population into kung-fu-kickin', fireball-flickin' seizure-inducing ninja supersoldiers!
If I had some plutonium ( like enough for a bomb, it might be cool to put it in some water and have the Cerenkerovov ( sp ) radiation as a nite-light in my room.
If I had plutonium I'd paint it with that stuff thy use to put the plastic grips on tools so it wouldn't make no dust or get on my skin, and toss it to my friends. It would be so funny when they caught a tiny 7 kg slug and dropped it ( have to make sure 7kg won't chain react and make too much radiation ) maybe use less, than 7 kg but isn't that the 1/7 the size of a soda can, but it would be kewl to amaze your friends with the wieght of your 'lump of lead'
If I had plutonium I'd try to make a bomb out of it. Then I'd take it to the desert and blow it up. If it went off that would frikken ROCK. I always wanted to see on of them suckers go off. I'd do it on the 4th of july and invite some friends to have a bonfire and like a 30 pack of Natural Ice. They ought to blow up a nuke in the desert every year on the 4th of July so ppl can party in the desert around the perimeter. That would be kewl.
Eat at Joe's.
While it is possible that somebody has smuggled away the plutonium, but this wasn't plutonium that was sitting around - it's an amount expected to be "extracted" from the processing of used nuclear fuel.
Makes it a bit tricky to track though, either they have a process that's inefficient, or somebody with sticky (and now possibly glowing) fingers.
Realistically, N. Korea can supposedly make their own nuclear material with the reactor they're revving up, so it probably hasn't been snitched by them. One would think that if anyone took it, they could trace the radiation signature though... this stuff probably leaves some time of trail.
If banks advertised regular "it's no big deal" accounting errors of +-3% in large bills and bearer bonds, I imagine you'd see a lot more embezzlement than you do today.
Just a thought.
It decayed!!!
====
Crudely Drawn Games
...In other news, officials at The Pacific Nuclear Research Facility have denied the rumor that the case of missing plutonium was in fact stolen from their vault two weeks ago. A Libyan terrorist group had claimed responsibility for the alleged theft, however, the officials now infer the crepency to a simple clerical error. The FBI...
# fuser -v
#
There is a large difference between banks and physical applications.
Banks work with exact numbers, when you measure you don't. You calculate with unexact values.
The rest is stochastics and theory of errors, which I'm probably not qualified enough to lecture about. Suffice to say, that the probability you have the exact value is practically zero.
The error margin, or more positively formulated, the confidence interval, describes the region in which the real value lies with a probability of 66% (Gaussian-distribution). An interval twice as large gives you 95% certainty.
Lastly, what I tried to emphasise in my summary:
It is not a discrepancy between the real value and the accounted value, but between an expected value and the registered amount.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
There is a large difference between banks and physical applications. Banks work with exact numbers, when you measure you don't. You calculate with unexact values.
1. Clearly if they failed to notice the discrepancies until they reached 206kg, so there must not have been a lot of day-to-day measurement. One assumes that they would have adjusted their predictions prior to this point if they were consistently seeing less output than expected.
2. In the absence of such day-to-day measurement I stand by my point. If someone had the opportunity to embezzle several kg of plutonium, there would be a reasonable chance that the plant managers would never find out (if they did find out, they could sound the alarm to the authorities, investigate their workers, etc.) So there's essentially one less line of security between the plant and potential purchasers than I'm comfortable with.
The plant security may be more than adequate. But if anyone can find a way to penetrate that security and hijack some Plutonium, this plant has advertised a huge vulnerability.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to scream at the breeder reactor advocates. We can't seem to keep track of the relatively small amount of Plutonium that we generate. Imagine if we move to a Plutonium-economy and have to ship the stuff from place to place.
..here's another. Israel has never confirmed they have nukes. Do you doubt they have them?
There's a world "official" list of nuke kaboom owners, then there's reality. I imagine there's at least a few more nations possess them then what let on publically and officially.
Obviously I can't *prove* japan has nukes, but I'd wager a significant sum on it without hesitation. The closest I've seen them come to admitting it was a statement by one of their defense guys a few months ago (sorry no link handy) about how fast and how hard they could respond to an attack. The expertise is more than there, they possess the plutonium now some large amount is "lost", and they were working on their own bomb in the 40's and might have made it had they started sooner.