Slashdot Mirror
London Nuke Plant Loses 30 Kilos of Plutonium
solafide writes "The Globe and Mail reports 'A British nuclear-reprocessing plant [at Sellafield] cannot account for nearly 30 kilograms of plutonium, but authorities believe it is an accounting issue rather than a loss of potential bomb-making material, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority said.' Although it says later plutonium is only 1% of what they deal with there. The Times Online has more details."
Whoa. Them Londerners is gonna build one of them atomic bombs and get us. Hey, GWB! Let's get em. The US is gonna bomb London now! Look out Tony Blair, you thought you was gonna trick us eh? Well, your gonna take a missile up the tailpipe from good ol Bush. Fsckin traitorous terrorist limey brit bastards. Ha! and you all thought that Iran and Syria would be next. We sure fooled you!
I know it's here somewhere.
San Francisco Photographers
sweet, I'll finally have fuel for my flux capacitor so I can get back to the 80's!
~/.sig: No such file or directory
Kim Jong Il is taking good care of it. He says so regularly!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
1%? What's the rest? Radonium? Poisonium? Uruntinum?! Oh no!!
Accountability?
Seems like nobody needs that irky little thing anymore. Not even if you're dealing with stuff that could blow up half the world.
Sheesh.
A small boy with a oval shaped head was seen today in Leicestershire(sp?) saying "VICTORY IS MINE!"
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Maybe Doc took it...for his time travel DeLorean. http://www.delorean.com/
Wasenme.
Do Not Eat iPod Shuffle
Please, move along.
1.21 Gigawatts?
I don't say that Boston is the same as New York. Please don't do this to my country.
At least not in any way beyond waving them around and acting brave. The real waging of war is done with guns, tanks, and the occasional butcher's knife.
I hope they find the plutonium, though. Marty McFly needs to get back to the future.
Why are people talking about RFID for every schoolchild, or GPS tracking for every car, but nothing like this is done for plutonium?
Uranium regeneration is a good thing. A nuclear reactor only uses about 4% of the uranium until it has to be either discarded or regenerated (because of reduced efficiency issues) but the regeneration process makes plutonium, which can then be used in a bomb. Most of the time, the plutonium is actually mixed with uranium and it can then be used as a fuel.
Hopefully fusion will come along sometime soon...
Remember after 9/11 and some nuclear plant had some rods missing. It was another accounting error i think. Never heard much more about it.
And if they're saying that this is within standards, then obviously the standards need to be tightened up. A gram or two isn't too serious, but thirty kilograms? Jeez.
It's been often said: the hard part of building a nuclear bomb isn't building it. It's getting the fissile materials ...
A nuclear weapon only uses about a grapefruit sized piece of fissionable material.
And only about 8 grams of matter were actually converted to enegery by the original nukes used against Japan.
30 kg missing seems like a big deal to me. I'd like to know for sure whether its an accounting issue or someone else has it.
Sellafield is right up in the north west of england. London is in the south east. The people who decided where to put Sellafield(then Windscale) are, however, based in London. Strangely they decided the best place for it was as far away as possible.
you had me at #!
If you reprocess tons of spent fuel then those little fraction-of-a-percent measurement errors add up. Also, in a big plant you could have an ounce of plutonium stuck in a filter one place, another ounce elsewhere, and add up to tens of kilos.
What's scary is that the margins of error are big enough to include several bombs worth of material.
The BBC has had this story since yesterday!
From what I read on http://news.bbc.co.uk, the "missing" plutonium was a result of the way in which material was accounted for, not an actual loss.
-- The problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back.
I know the first word in the article is London, but that's where the story was posted. The last time I looked Sellafield was in Cumbria, see Sellafield for more details of this glowing area of the U.K.
1.05 Bushels!
Couldn't you guys at least wait to see if it's really missing? It's probably right next to those two disks from Los Alamos. Sheesh.
Great! Now, those British blokes are going to be lynched for proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Bush is going to invade that island and make it the 51st state. In other news, the queen, suspected of drinking a suspect cocktail, has turned into a gigantic, mean, green, old lady terrorizing the common folks into bowing before her smelly legs.
Sellafield 'lost' plutonium
By Angela Jameson, Industrial Correspondent
Britain's major nuclear site at Sellafield has "lost" almost 30 kilograms of plutonium, according to figures published today.
The annual audit of nuclear material at all of Britain's civil nuclear installations revealed that the plutonium -- enough for seven or eight nuclear bombs -- was classified as "material unaccounted for" last year.
The revelation that such a large amount of plutonium has apparently disappeared has been described as merely an "accounting issue" by British Nuclear Fuels, which operates the plant.
However, it is likely to cause embarrassment as the British Nuclear Group and the Department of Trade and Industry are weeks away from completing a huge shake-up in the nuclear industry, with the creation of an independent Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
The discrepancy compares with a 19kg loss at Sellafield in 2003 and a cumulative loss of about 50kg at the Cumbrian plant over the past ten years. A BNG spokeswoman said: "There is always a discrepancy between the physical inventory and the book inventory.
"Some years there is an apparent gain, some years there is an apparent loss."
The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) said the figure was within international standards of expected measurement accuracies.
The International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) lays down rules for the permitted levels of "material unaccounted for", which must not exceed about 3 per cent of the plutonium throughput.
Given the huge quantities reprocessed at Sellafield, this year's discrepancy falls within these standards. But independent experts have described the figure as deeply worrying.
"They make this claim of an auditing problem but I would expect them to be overzealous in the current climate of fears about terrorism," said John Large, an independent nuclear consultant.
Dr Frank Barnaby, a specialist in nuclear weapons, said: "There will always be some material unaccounted for but this is a dramatic development.
"This is a major reason for not reprocessing spent nuclear fuel because you can't tell what the material unaccounted for is."
All nuclear material at Sellafield, including the content of contaminated ponds and any emissions, are measured every year, according to guidelines endorsed by the IAEA.
The fact that the figures do not balance is embarrassing rather than sinister. They do not imply that any material has been improperly diverted, or that there has been a breach of security at the site.
Keeping track of just how much material is present at the plant at any one time is tricky, and subject to errors. Spent nuclear fuel rods, which have been inside nuclear reactors for about five years, are taken to Sellafield for reprocessing.
They are allowed to cool in ponds for up to four years before they are treated. The process then involves cutting up the fuel rods, dissolving them in acid and then separating the solution into three streams -- uranium, plutonium, and high-level waste.
At each stage of the process the material is weighed and calculations made of the amounts of plutonium it contains. All this has to be done remotely behind shielding because of the radioactivity involved.
At the end of the process the weight of the plutonium recovered ought to balance with the estimates of the amount put in. They seldom do, but the discrepancy is rarely as large as it is this year.
Small measuring errors can accumulate to produce large discrepancies, as they have done this year.
A spokesman for the UKAEA said today: "The MUF (material unaccounted for) figures for 2003/04 were all within international standards of expected measurement accuracies for closing a nuclear material balance at the type of facility concerned.
"There is no evidence to suggest that any of the apparent losses reported were real losses of nuclear material."
Sellafield reprocesses spent fuel, and employs more
what is this enough for... in the right hands? a dirty bomb? scary thoughts...
--------
rochelle brief physiatry rehabilitation
30 kilos of weapons-grade is enough to make no more than 2 crude bombs, so the whole world is not really in danger. Just a couple of large cities.
If it wasn't weapons-grade, you could make one hell of a dirty bomb out of it, but not really anything that makes a big boom with a pretty mushroom cloud on top.
Lookie here
for actual humans.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Its in the North West of England. There's more to England than that dump known as London.
"cannot account for nearly 30 kilograms of plutonium... Although it says later plutonium is only 1% of what they deal with there."
Does this mean they are missing 3000kg of uranium?
Pompous dickhole.
I wonder, do they use double entry accounting? I would assume so.
That's a pretty big f'n accounting error.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Probably been planted in Iraq!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There go those accountants, stirring up trouble again...
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
For once, it's not the Americans with egg on our face for being idiots. But I'm sure it won't be long until we regain that distinction...
bash: rtfm: command not found
In other news, Iran has claimed faulty accounting practices have led the United State's government to believe they are producing nuclear fuel that can potentially be used to make nuclear weapons. The Iranian government is really attempting to produce a cheap source of nuclear power. The official word from the US is that this changes nothing and that Iran can still be a threat to the economies of surrounding regions.
this is 100% offtopic, but did /. fire micheal? Haven't seen a post from him in quite a while...
1. Sellafield is nowhere near London.
Sellafield is well known for mistakes, so well known in fact that it changed it's name to Sellafield, it's old name was Windscale.
Nothing new here, please move along.
http://www.nucleartourist.com/events/windscal.htm
if peace is to be had, people must be respected as the same, without regard to wealth. the uber rich are the shadow government. and it ain't limited to the usa, they are foreclosing on the usa quicker than GM left michigan. don't fall for it. god gave you a brain, and they can only take it away with mindless tv and alcohol and unresolved suffering. think about it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Just like the 'missing' Los Alamos disks. I get blamed for 'missing' stuff all the time when in reality, it's just mislabeled and on a shelf somewhere.
With 2 grams of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode a high building.
With 10 grams of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode a small town.
With 30 grams of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode a big town.
With 100 grams of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode a small city.
With 200 grams of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode a big city.
With 400 grams of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode a land of 1000 Km^2.
With 1 Kilo of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode half country (100,000 Km^2).
With 2 Kilos of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode fews countries.
With 4 Kilos of Plutonium, the terrorists can explode fews bigger countries and many smaller countries.
WOOWWWWWWWWW!!!!, impresssslyyyyy!!!!
With 30 Kilos, it's heavyly useless!!!.
I guess next week Slashdot will report that someone is selling it on ebay.
(prepares my credit card)
President Bush announced that a smoking gun was found today in Iraq in the form of 30 kilograms of plutonium. Mission Accomplished!
it is possible to make a nuclear bomb out of any element. for some odd reason, people think radioactive = nuclear bomb.
while it will not tell you anything about bombs, watch october sky to see something about thinking.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
was watching it on TV 24 hours ago. It's just an audit error, not missing material stolen.
Wow, who whould have thought that Britin is still pissed off at us over the Boston Tea Party! What soar loosers.
Make a bomb, eh?
Reactor grade plutonium isn't nearly as volatile as bomb plutonium. I wouldn't say this is such large concern, as it takes a good deal of energy/tech to create bomb grade shit out of reactor grade shit.
Aside from a dirty bomb, of course. Or something wholely unenthralling.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
it would be highly difficult for most people to get any use out of that plutonium. radioactive material is purified to only 3% for use in power plants and needs to be purified up to somewhere around 90% to be weapons grade.
ergo, i don't think i would be extremely worried if someone had stolen it.
They have teh Weapons of Mass Destruckshun!
BOM THEM NOW!
You have to be fucking kidding me? Watch out for the green altoids.
back in the 80's or do you mean now.... oops... wait, this is slashdot after all
This sig is intentionally blank
Damn it, then Liverpool fans got into the nuclear power station again! Time to send things by Royal mail, it'll never arrive so at least it's safe in a black hole.
I like muppets.
The Globe and Mail reports "A British nuclear bomb isn't too serious" the authority said. "There, it is not possible to construct a nuclear weapons of kilos." What's scary is that much material probably doesn't exist, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority added. In 2003 the plutonium, which can then be used against Japan, went 30 kg missing a nuclear weapon. Kilos, OK?
Also what's scary is that by reason alone, you'd expected measurement inaccuracies for a fissile material, brought into an explosion -- but nasty anyway. For the right conditions for closing at the technology to refine it into a self-sustaining fission reactor only 1% of what they'd be a little fraction to turn into a small enough to include several bomb-making material, the process makes plutonium stuck in a filter in one place, another ounce of plutonium is actually mixed with it there.
A British nuclear reaction to turn into a self-sustaining fission reaction is a joke. To turn into weapon only 1% of what there'd be a little more care in tracking at the plant which cannot account for 19 kilograms of plutonium.
The amount of mass destruction of a nuclear weapon only uses about a football sized piece of plutonium, and terrorism and it can then be used in a big deal with figures published since the 1970s. To pre-empt the margins of kilos, that is.
What's scary is that for that reason alone, you'd expected measurement errors to add up. Also, in a bomb, most of the technology to refine it into weapons-grade plutonium is not in existence. The plant cannot be having an accounting issue rather than a loss of plutonium which is actually mixed with figures published since the time, but the plutonium, which can then annihilate those little fractions. Not an explosion -- you need to energy by the size of a medicine ball.
A nuclear weapon of spent fuel would then be used as a fuel. You'd think. But a nuclear-reprocessing plant cannot account for nearly 30 kilograms of plutonium. At the plant you could not account for nearly 30 kilograms of matter that were actually converted to be either discarded or regenerated. It is a good thing then, wouldn't you say?
I would replace the word "Loses" with "Sells". And perhaps tack "To Terrorists" on the end for good luck.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
They found the paperwork, and some guy named "Osama" signed for it.
My rights don't need management.
Don't you think? I mean, didn't a story break maybe 2-3 weeks ago here in the U.S. along those lines? Perhaps they should secure those nuclear facilities as well as they say they will.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
Let's not go ballistic, here.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
In the 60.s they had a reprocessing fire and had to vent a whole lot of nasty stuff up special chimneys (previously known as Cockroft's Follies, until they were put to the test) which fortunately caught most of the crap. These towers will have to remain sealed for at least 10,000 years. 30 lb's hummm - seems about right.
The Wikipedia is short on detail. I was born 30 miles from Sellafield and I remember cows being killed and milk poured away. The whole of the North of England was nearly lost - Chernobyl style. The Irish Sea is still rather hot.
Also when Chernobyl did happen a hot spot was reported in the NW of England (Lake District). Some thougth it might have been hot to begin with.
The manufacturing process for plutonium is largely a mass-balance system. That "lost" plutonium could have literally leaked out from any point in the process and be sitting in the soil of the site.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Reminds me of a quote from terry pratchett & neil gaiman's Good Omens (a book which depicts a very British apocolypse, including satan's admiraton the london beltway among other englandisms)
- "Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"
- There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and who is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
-- The BBC interviews a nuclear spokesperson (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
a very funny read by the way. drop by your library and check it out.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Sellafield is actually at the opposite end of the country from London. Paris, for example, is closer.
At the beginning of every Simpsons episode, Homer pulls out something radioactive from his shirt and tosses it away. I'll bet that's added up to 30 kg over the years!
"And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?" said the interviewer.
There was a pause. "We wouldn't say escaped," said the spokesman. "Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid."
"You mean it is still on the premises?"
"We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them," said the spokesman.
"Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"
There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strong terrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."
"But you said the power station is still producing electricity," gasped the interviewer.
"It is."
"How can it still be doing that if it hasn't got any reactors?"
"We don't know," he said. "We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea."
That was some really good nyborg man.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Did anyone think to check Stewie Griffin's Christmas stocking?
He won't be in the Death Corridor, in Texas.
Other people can have atomic bombs or plutonium boxes, and they won't be in the Death Corridor because of unlawful of USofA.
Bill Gates is a DANGER! for NSA (National Security Agency).
Because the Pu-240 is a neutron emitter, would cause premature detonation, *mumble mumble mumble* kilogram disks stacked in a beryllium tube with about *mumble mumble mumble* kg of high explosive *mumble mumble mumble* at one end, each separated by a material such as *mumble mumble mumble* - explosive compression enhanced by simply cutting a hole in each disk and rotating them *mumble mumble mumble* degrees... stick the whole thing in a block of carbon-doped concrete, put it in the trunk of a car, and drive it up to *mumble mumble mumble*. Yield roughly *mumble mumble mumble* kilotons. Hmmm. Add a little cobalt to the *mumble mumble mumble*... you could make one to test, and have *mumble mumble mumble* left for use.
Of course you realize that in real life I'm a pastry chef.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I'd buy Apple computers, and Micorosft shares -- or maybe SGI and SUN (I might not make as much, but I'd feel a lot better about it).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
You are thinking small.
They have the plutonium, now all they need is an old Delorean and time as we know it is no more!
Cheers,
Adolfo
Isn't it bad enough that they're admitting they can't keep track of plutonium accurately enough to be within a few bomb's worth of precision? That that error rate is not only acceptable, but the norm? And that we're supposed to be ramping up production of nuclear material because it's "safer"?
--
make install -not war
A boyscout ( http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html ) has it?
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
a few years ago, as i recall.
Good job, Slashdot posters! You done us proud!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
A Randolph, Massachusetts resident going by the handle 'MarcQuadra' has discovered a briefcase that magically lowers his heating bill by 90%. When asked about it he replied only that he can now afford an LCD screen, but his eye fluids have all boiled off.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
... despite the extreme unlikelyhood of such an event of someone walking out with some nuclear material (come on, if you can walk out of a nuclear facility with that sort of material, you clearly deserve a medal and better health insurance because frankly, you'll need it) I wouldn't really worry about it. There'd be a lot of people that would suddenly start looking for whoever had the plutonium and it'd probably be found quickly. Else it'd probably be used in bad ways, but when you really look at the scheme of things, we're doomed anyways right? Let's go out in style! Anyhow worrying about possible things is utterly pointless. Waiting for death is a waste of your time, go have fun instead.
[!] No, I can't see my comments. They are not worthy of +3 moderation.
North Korea stole it.
...at least, the parts that had been declassified by then (late 1980s). I liked science, engineering, and military concepts, and besides, I figured maybe bullies won't risk beating up someone that knows how to build an atomic bomb.
I once co-opted history class for about 20 minutes after the teacher asked me whether the uranium in a nuclear power plant was in danger of exploding like an atomic bomb. I explained a lot about atomic weapons, hydrogen weapons, antimatter weapons, the history of their develoment, theories behind detonation practice, why it forms a mushroom, etc. etc. The teacher and a few of the hardier souls asked me questions, but everyone else was deathly silent.
-ulatekh (I would have posted with my name, but apparently I already moderated this conversation.)
Oh, is that the "bowling balls" that also have uranium around the plutonium core, then aluminium and high explosives. Yeah...we know those...
Hey, it's not a good night unless you get a 30kg lump of plutonium. It's the policewoman's helmet and the suspenders I don't understand.
...it's about 280 miles north west of London. Sheesh, you can tell this posting was put up by a yank! :)
Who were the accountants? Arthur Andersen? Deloitte? I am sure this makes Enron proud.
How does this relates to Science?
A tall, messy-haired scientist answering to the name 'Doc'.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
I stole it to travel through time.
--E.B.
Are you saying antimatter weapons already exist?
Play Command HQ online
This is not new news. That the newspaper printed this today still does not make it new news. Not new is: Old!
Paul Beardsell
Have they checked checked ebay?
We are the people our parents warned us about.
You know, losing 30 pounds is the easy part -- keeping it off is the hard part.
When i tell people i'm from the Netherlands they always want to know if i'm close to Amsterdam. And my answer is always yes.
For Dutch standards i'm far away from Amsterdam, but for most people in the world pretty much everybody in the Netherlands lives close to Amsterdam, since it only takes 2 to 3 hours to drive across the country.
Sample this!
"Wounded thum?"
...
... Sellafield Blue! Excellent vintage. Mind you there's only 30kg left."
"Yes, you know, rhyming slang, 'Wounded thumb', 'Plutonium'."
"Plutonium? Good God man
"One careful owner, guv'. Lovely condition, original wrapping, yours for a fraction of the original cost."
"Where did you get that from?"
"Fell off the back of a lorry, guv'nor, dinnit, know what I mean? Wonderful glow
30kg of plutonium should be enough for anyone.
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
Sellafield is nowhere near London. It's about a 300 mile drive away according to Multimap. It's at the complete opposite side of the country.
They better find it! I mean, it must be somewhere. Plutonium doesn't just suddenly disappear or turn into Uranium or something.
Free as in mason.
Well, that small oval-headed boy was only ticked off because his dreams of Jolly Farm where shattered.
They'll tell you what it does.
Nothing to worry about. It's a natural thing to loose it.
Ever heard of radioactive decay?
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
On several occasions (years) Sellafield has reclaimed more fuel than estimated.
How come we don't see headlines like, "Anonymous Source Returns 20Kg of Plutonium to Nuclear Power plant."
Some weird guy in a DeLorean was seen at the spot, doing roughly 88 mph, before mysteriously disappearing ...
You're right, I'd like to point out also that the same atom can have different toxicity depending on its oxidation state. If you have seen Erin Brockovich, where the whole case was Cr(VII) being measured with the emission limit of Cr(III), causing poisoning among the population, well that's the same thing.
U and Pu are actinides, and that means they can have many different oxidation states, each with its own chemistry.
This is also why lead in gasoline and paint is carcinogen, while veterans have lived with lead bullets in their body for decades.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Somebody set up us the bomb.
Halliburton misplaces Americium in Massachusetts, fails to notify Nuclear Regulatory Commission within federally-mandated deadline.
Hasn't the Royal Mail got some new trendy name now -- courtesy of Blair and his acolytes?
A package sent my relatives from the UK to CA did not arrive. Within 24 hours, the Royal mail told me they had delivered it to Oakland. 6 months later, the USPS told me they had no clue about it.
Tuesday, I sent a package from Fremont, CA to Menlo Park, CA (must be at least 15 miles) via FedEx. When I checked earlier today, the package was in Memphis, TN.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
... to Windscale again. :-)
I overheard one of our techies saying he's spilt some plutonium the other day.
Turned out he'd actually been fixing the colour printer and had a problem with the "blue toner drum". *phew*
That's a pretty good account of how society as we know it will end;
It won't be atomic war...
It won't be biological warfare...
It won't be nanotechnology running wild...
It WILL BE bad accounts.
- "They misunderestimated me."
There was never a 'loss' of plutonium as such, simply a miscalculation which resulted in them having less plutonium than they had estimated at the begging. It mixed with other things at the begging, when they first try and work out how much thy will have so they can not get an accurate amount. Whats more scary is the fact that they had more then they estimated a few years back.
looks like it's just here!
None of this will be of any importance once the Americans bomb your country back to stone age like you deserve, you fourth axis of evil, you!
What are we going to do tomorrow night? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!
Sellafield is a long way from London.
it's spelled "nucular", not nuclear...everybody knows that!
if by London you mean Cumbria, a county in the north of England, far far away from London and by Nuke plant, you mean Spent fuel reprocessing plant then you are correct.
bet they havent looked in their top pocket in the shirt thats in the wash, that's where i always find things
check the route http://rp.rac.co.uk/routeplanner?advanced=false&fNeil Garman? Garmain? Gaimen?
That is what the voices in my head are telling me. I wish there was some easy way of checking things like this out without walking down to the bookshop.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Actually, it reminds me David Langford's "The Leakey Establishment", which traces the gradual theft of all the active warhead cores from a UK weapons development lab. And their replacement with dummies.
Intriguing. We have to go to great lengths to isolate radioactive material because if it gets out into the environment it will kill everyone and yet if terrorists leak radioactive material into the environment 'they probably wouldn't kill anyone'.
By this logic, we should give all the hazardous waste to terrorists as it will be the cheapest, safest way to dispose of it.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Sigh. England is not just London.
Sellafield/Windscale is rather a long way away.
Do you think they'd site a nuclear reprocessing plant anywhere near the Members of Parliament or their houses in the home counties? c'mon.
--
http://www.ivor.it/goog - MSN Search unbiased?
Is Real!
Not Free SF Reader
In 1977 the United States announced the successful underground detonation of an atomic weapon made from civil plutonium - in 1962. In a Department of Energy publication on weapons nonproliferation it says "Virtually any combination of plutonium isotopes -- the different forms of an element having different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei -- can be used to make a nuclear weapon." The report goes on to say "While reactor-grade plutonium has a slightly larger critical mass than weapon-grade plutonium (meaning that somewhat more material would be needed for a bomb), this would not be a major impediment for design of either crude or sophisticated nuclear weapons." It even evaluates how the ability of the organization building the weapon affects the scenario - " At the lowest level of sophistication, a potential proliferating state or subnational group using designs and technologies no more sophisticated than those used in first-generation nuclear weapons could build a nuclear weapon from reactor-grade plutonium that would have an assured, reliable yield of one or a few kilotons (and a probable yield significantly higher than that)."
That's a bad thing, but what really worries me is that the management of the Sellafield plant are probably right that the missing material was not removed from the facility. They are using the plutonium in the creation of Mixed OXide fuel (MOX), a mixture of plutonium- and uranium oxide fit for normal nuclear power plants. The process involved includes various complicated cutting, soaking, and moving activities which must be done remotely due to the extreme radiation hazard. Due to the reactions of the various substances involved, this process also results in accelerated and unusual state changes in the materials. So they're not really sure what happened to the stuff - where it may be lying around or how much of it has turned into what - even though it is still under their control. There wasn't an accounting error - they can't account for the stuff because their accounting system doesn't work. They don't understand the process well enough to predict the outcome. And that scares me.
What the hell, they use PLANTS to get rid of these things now?
I for one wouldn't trust a green thingie stuck in the ground with my 30 kilos of plutonium...
Plutonium is no more toxic than lead or other heavy metals. Radium is more than 200 times as radiotoxic than arsenic.
http://russp.org/BLC-3.html
From Wikipedia's article titled "Plutonium":
As of 2003, there has yet to be a single human death officially attributed to plutonium exposure. Naturally-occurring radium is about 200 times more radiotoxic than plutonium, and some organic toxins like botulism toxin are still more toxic. Botulism toxin, in particular, has a lethal dose in the hundreds of pg per kg, far less than the quantity of plutonium that poses a significant cancer risk. In addition, beta and gamma emitters (including the C-14 and K-40 in nearly all food) can cause cancer on casual contact, which alpha emitters cannot.
You could always walk down to the library...
Where was it the last time you had it?
Have you tried looking under the bed - that's where most of the stuff I loose ends up.
No?
Bugger it then, must be an accounting issue.
Coding Monkey.org - Spanging the heavy spade of truth into t
Remember this story, about 19 September 2004
"Fury as bomb-grade plutonium sets sail for France from US" http://www.sundayherald.com/44923
Did the ships ever get to England ?
Maybe thats where the stuff is ?
Remember this story, about 2004-06-11 14:42
British nuclear losses continue to rise http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafiel
Losing money like its going out of fashion ?
Need to sell some stuff sir do you ohh sir ?
"Today the world stands at a crossroads.
Will the needed steps be taken to avert the world-wide proliferation of nuclear bomb materials,
or will it be too little, too late?"
Place your bets
Lotto plutonium tickets avaliable at your local outlet
Sunday big bonus plutonium draw with a roll over of !
That's what t'internet is for duh! (cluestick... amazon anyone?)
;)
I'm going to install my humour chip now...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
But not that big - Sellafield is in Cumbria, about as far away from London as you can get in England (which is not the same as UK)
Dr. Christmas Jones: The world's greatest terrorist running around with six kilos of weapons-grade plutonium can't be good. I gotta get it back, or someone's gonna have my ass.
James Bond: First things first.
However, it would make a nasty dirty bomb.
A nasty dirty bomb? Doesn't galavanting across the world firing armour piercing bullets and shells which are tipped with depleted uranium amount to the same as letting off a so called dirty bomb?
At least a dirty bomb has a single epicentre of effect which allows a cleanup to be focussed at that point. Every time a DU coated bullet or shell is fired a small cloud of DU dust is lost into the atmosphere, polluting the environment.
Ahh no - doesn't count though does it? 'Cos we are the good guys right?
Since you asked, as a native of that county, I can confirm it is spelt Leicestershire. Albeit pronounced like "Lest.sh." (with a null vowel where I put each . in that).
So either thier accounting is wrong (which means they have no idea if they have lost more, or even if they are always loosing some) or 30kg's is out and about... and thier security didn't track it...
:"it was here yesterday... 30kgs" :"zzo jim, I be thank you for showing me your job of work, I like you very muchness, do not be going into the London on the Marchy five, ok, ciao ciao buddy buddy, klkazzxk!"
Which is worse?
Plutonium security guard 1
Plutonium security guard new friend
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It will turn up. Look under the disks..http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 2/12/0458200&tid=123&tid=17
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
As many posters have pointed out Sellafiled (or Windscale as it was called before its last major incident) is nowhere near London. It's on the Irish sea which is handy for all that nasty run-off from the plant.
Luminous green is the 41st shade to be added to existing 40 shades of green Ireland had become famous for.
Sellafield is nowhere near london (in UK terms, obviously in US terms everywhere in the UK is practically the same place).
nowhere in the article does it even mention London. Sellafield is in Cumbria, very far north, and closer to Ireland than London (which is why they [Ireland] make such a fuss about it in the first place).
Perhaps you could have picked a better example of a US name :-)
Ok, I'm late to this, but you should all know that Sellafield is closer to Dublin, capital city of Ireland than it is to London.
Sellafield is nowhere fucking near London.
London = South East
Sellafield = North West
Even the slightest bit of fact checking would reveal that Sellafield != London.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Yet another US ally selling nukes to terrorists...
*ducks*
the should look for about 25 kg of lead :)
Omry.
"There is no evidence to suggest that any of the apparent losses reported were real losses of nuclear material," the authority added.
To paraphrase; "It's not lost, we just don't know where it is".
--
a very worried Londoner
Poo!
http://www.pickatrail.com/jupiter/location/europe/ england/cumbria.html/
here
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
I live in London and when i read that I was thinking, "Is Sellafield near London, I always thought it was in the other end of England."
The moral of the story is: Never assume an American knows geography better than you, even if he writes for slashdot.
Sindri Traustason.
Day 1: Devolution for Lancashie (assuming you mean the historical boundaries) Day 2: Civil war between Manchester and Liverpool begins Day 4: Preston secedes, taking the entire north of the county with it Day 5: US-led coalition invades to restore democracy and peace
Day 2: Civil war between Manchester and Liverpool begins
Day 4: Preston secedes, taking the entire north of the county with it
Day 5: US-led coalition invades to restore democracy and peace
Guys, its not in London, its not anywhere near London, that Nuke Plant is located in the north west of England, practically in Scotland, we are talking hundreds of miles away.
dybia felly dwi a hampster (i think therefore i am a hampster)
But as well all know, war is God's way of teaching Americans Geography ;-)
That's nothin'... I saw diet pill photo where one dude lost over 350lbs.
Whenever I'm missing a few kilos of plutonium, it usually ends up being under the couch. Often the cat's got it. They might want to have a look there. Especially if they have cats on the site...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Eh, it's nowhere near London, sort out yer geography!
Even in old times, the plant in Winsgale (now called Sellafield) was losing radioactive material all the time. You could out for swimming in the sea, come back at night and you didn't need a flashlight, cause you were glowing.
First up, as others have noted, London and Sellafield are quite a long way away.
Secondly, the headline "Nuke Plant Loses 30 Kilos of Plutonium" is quite ridiculous. Anyone with half a brain would realise quite how off the mark this is. Has anyone thought about how you would go about doing a stock take on a collection of Plutonium?!! You don't just go and collect it from the storeroom and take it to the weighing scales.
In fact the auditing process involved some of the top UK statistics researchers and no doubt lots and lots of other people.
Does anyone here use their brain before they post stories?
CNN (3 or 4 months later): North Korea, Iran, Syria & Al-Qaida stolen the 30 kg of plutonium ! and you know what too ? they have built chemical weapons also ... lets bomb them ...
I just ordered some Iosat Potassium Iodide pills. After hearing about North Korea and then the government report of possible future attacks I had heard enough. I live within 15 miles of Seabrook in NH and I'm well within the 300 mile radius of several other nuclear power plants. If Chernobyl did nothing else it served as opportunity do study the effects of fallout on people and it showed that leukemia and skin cancer didn't increase after the meltdown, but thyroid cancer did, but only in areas were KI wasn't distributed. What's your towns emergency supply and do you think you'd be able to get to it in an emergency?
Whenever something goes missing, they assure you that you're in no danger. They don't know where it went, don't know who took it, but somehow they know how it will be used.
"A train car full of finely ground anthrax went missing today, officials have no idea who took it or where it went. But they do know one thing- you're in no danger"
Yet when the police arrest a guy possessing a crudely-made ounce of the stuff, they proclaim that they averted a major catastrophy where millions could have died.
Keith Richards ran off with it! He's used up everything thing else to the very last drop, so he's trading up.
It's not the metric system which messes things up. It's the English system (which is pretty much not being used in England any more). If it wasn't for the US Media always throing out English measurements, I'd probably know just how tall 183cm was.
And the perverse thing is, your so-called "English" measurements aren't the same as the old-fashioned ones still used in England (and the rest of the UK).
For example, the American pint is equal to 0.8 Imperial (British) pints; fluid ounces are also different.
The UK made moves to go metric over 30 years ago (when my Mum started teaching in the early 1970s, they were teaching kids in metric *then*!), but pints, miles and so on are still in wide use.
I default to metres/centimetres for distance (though I can visualise inches reasonably well), centigrade for temperature (have to convert fahrenheit), and yet I still drive in miles per hour, buy milk in (imperial) pints, measure my height in feet and inches, and weigh myself in pounds and stones (though when I was using the gym I did it in kilograms instead).
Oh yeah; stones. That's one measure you Americans don't have; 1 stone = 14 pounds.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I found it on ebay, the starting bid is $25.00 and he will ship international.
Sellafield is nowhere near London. It's about as far away as you can get while still being in England (ie. it's close to Scotland).
Sellafield turns up an unexpected 29.6Kg of americum-241 and a few stray beta particles.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
-b.
The weapons grade materials are produced at Aldermaston, Berkshire (about 45 miles west of London) about 10 miles from my house.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
is that the article says, "The amount of material listed as missing at the Sellafield plant in northwestern England was "within international standards of expected measurement accuracies for closing a nuclear material balance at the type of facility concerned," the authority said." What the fuck? I don't think any should be allowed to be missing without MAJOR alarms going off and people freaking the fuck out. That shit's controlled by the IAEA for a reason.
IIRC this happens all the time-- you have a big chemical plant with kilofeet of pipes. You have fuel rods dissolved in hot acid. You have various chemical reactions going on, some jangled a bit by radioactive effects. You have bored, semi-skilled technicians working three shifts. You end up with various soups containing hopefully separated chemical elements. You have your basic bits of Murphy's laws, resulting in vapor deposition, electrochemical deposition, sedimentation, gunk getting stuck in valve sleeves and filters, stuff condensing out in unexpectedly cool pipes, the whole gamut of undesireable side efects and reactions. And all this is happening behind several feet of concrete, inside opaque pipes, retorts, valves, pumps, and widgets. What percentage of the stuff is going to get stuck in the various gadgets? What percent of solid X is going to quietly end up in solution Y, then thrown away? I'd guess a 3% loss rate would be rather good.
He built a time machine, but needs plutonium to power the flux capacitor before reaching 88 miles per hour.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Sellafield is hundreds of miles from London in the opposite corner of the country. London != the entire UK. Please, please, please try and grasp the basic geography of the world outside North America.
Plutonium is a thousand times more toxic than arsenic. Arsenic has an LD50 of 15mg/kg (milligrams of arsenic per kilo of body weight). Plutonium's toxicity is 0.015 mg/kg.
n d_ year.htmln tversion.cf m?documentID=437m /site/pp.asp?c=coI HKTMHF&b=83909o stoxic.htm
These references aren't great, props to anyone who can find better:
http://web.reed.edu/ehs/chemistry_safety/4.seco
http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/pri
http://www.seventhgeneration.co
http://users.aol.com/DaveMcCall/m
Xenu loves you!
anybody want 30kb plutonium? very cheap! not much $$$ !
You Americans can't spell ...
Doh!
Sellafield is in Cumbria. That's practically Scotland.
Boston is where people who can not pronouce a single R live
No, get it right.
Rule1: Rs following long vowels and preceeding cononants, unstressed vowells or pauses in speech are "swallowed" -- which is to say you draw out the vowel by expulsion of breath. The swallowed R sound is conventionally represented by the consonant h in orthography. Thus: "It was really cold out so I put on my pahkah.
Rule 2: When an R follows a short vowel and precedes a consonant, unstressed vowel or pause in speech, the R is not pronounced and the vowel is pronounced as if it had a german umlaut. Example:"Some people like drip cauffee by I like pëk'd."
Rule3: Rs in other places, (i.e. between vowels or at the start of words) are voiced. Thus: "Then it got wahm and it was like fuckin' paradise."
Rule4: When a vowel is followed in speech by an unstressed vowel, an "r" sound is inserted between them. Example: "My brothuh is dating Patricar O'Toole."
Note in the last example, it is "brothuh not "brother" because the vowel in "is" is stressed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I know the UK might seem rather small to you US guys, but Sellafield is over 250 miles away from London. One is in the SE corner of the country, the other the NW corner of England.
And by heck, I can remember when it were called Windscale.
The major reason is the war crime idea of "Shock and Awe" in first place.
Aw, what's the matter? You don't get a cathartic thrill out of the idea of inflicting "shock and awe" on a massive scale, just like the 9/11 attacks inflicted it on US citizens? You think there's maybe a little moral problem with the means and ends, there, and a resulting risk of becoming the thing you're fighting against?
The lack of human reflection shown in the excited use of that New Cool Term was appalling. (As a strategy, too, it sure worked to make the Iraqi army commanders come over to our side... didn't it? And telegraphing the whole thing by talking about it in the media sure made it more effective... didn't it? Or no. Maybe not. Maybe the whole thing was one more example of the US Air Power fallacy, Vietnam B52 carpet bombing-style.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
They could still make a dirty bomb. (And they'd just "dirty" enough to try it, too!)
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
This is a story I remember from the late 70's/early 80's, when I was growing up in Ireland. Nuclear materials leaked from Sellafield caused birth defetcs in Ireland.
I guess not much has changed.
. . . and then after class you promptly had your underwear pulled over your head and were slammed in your locker.
I know . . . I know . . .
Any statement, hint, implication, or transferal of information via osmossis which may indicate the physical existance of conceptual warfare devices including, but not limited to, antimatter warheads, x-ray lasers, and particle beam weapons is hereby categorically and without reservation denied.
Pay no mind to the men in the dark suits.
Thank you, have a nice day
Also in the audit it was revealed that the lead containment around the reactor weighs 30kg more than it did in 1977....
--Shemnon
Listen the guy and LEARN something you moron.
I don't have a sig.
I thought it felt heavy when I picked it up.
Well, if they say it's an 'accounting error', then I guess that means they're not expecting me to give it back, right?
This is one of those stories that gets reported every few years when some nuclear facility releases an audit.
The headline screams "X kilos of plutonium missing" making it sound as if plutonium went missing in one chunk but down in the story it is always revealed that the loss is not unusual and is in fact perfectly in keeping with the expected error of the accounting system. In other words, nothing newsworthy whatsoever happened at all.
The fact that these audits get reported as if they were in fact news reveals the systemic anti-nuclear bias of the media.
There's also the fact that if you say "I'm from General Area" people will make the guess that you come from Big City, located around General Area.
A lot of Americans map the British Isles to London (and possibly Ireland to Dublin), France to Paris, and Japan to Tokyo, etc.
While I was in Belgium, most people thought I was from New York, or at least asked me about NY, so this isn't purely an American thing.
As mentioned in Cryptonomican, it's really just a way of saying "Place I know the name of, or where ever the hell you people come from."
best designs have a chance of a fizzle due to premature fission
You said it brother!
I wish there was some easy way of checking things like this out without walking down to the bookshop.
Me too.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
than making one out of jello. Though the pyschological damage of such a thing would be unmatched.
__________________
Huh?
Have you never heard of the interweb? You can use the interweb to find a local taxi firm, so you needn't walk at all.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Actually, coumadin doesn't contain arsenic. The sodium salt, a commonly used formulation, is
C19H15NaO4.
Your basic point, however, that the main danger of Pu is inhalation, is correct.
Opps!
And once I'm inside Disney World, I'll be able to visit: New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Washington, Little Rock, McDonalds, The Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls
And all of those other wonderful places I've seen on TV.
Don't you know, you can't visit all those places in Disney World, you have to go to Vegas to get to all those places.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I much rather have my meat products without botulin, than without nitrites, thank you very much
And I would rather live without cancer than without radiation, but why expose yourself needlessly? Maybe it's Ok to have preservatives in your survival rations that you want to last for 10 years, but for everyday food it's Ok to keep even your cans in refrigerator and consume them within several months. If they were prepared properly, sealed while hot, there is really no need for preservatives.
"blitzkrieg" translates to "lightning war".
The idea behind blitzkrieg isn't a massive bombing campaign - It's to advance in an invasion so rapidly that the enemy has no time to fall back and regroup.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Near the bleak hellhole that is Seascale.
Peter