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
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
1.21 Gigawatts?
I don't say that Boston is the same as New York. Please don't do this to my country.
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.
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.
"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?
I know it's a terrible stereotype that Americans have no idea about the geography of the outside world, but a 250 mile error (*Paris* is closer to London than Sellafield is) makes BNFL's 30kg look utterly innocent...
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
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.
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.
Let's not go ballistic, here.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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."
I'm guessing what you are thinking about is causing fission in the other transuranics (or anything with Z numbers greater than lead) by using high-energy neutrons. Even in that case, you will not get the exponential growth in energy necessary to make a nuclear bomb. There are only a few nuclides that have the right properties for making a nuclear bomb.
If you want to include fusion, then using anything other than hydrogen in the mix is real challenging .
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
...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...
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.
Too late. Tony Blair already made us the 51st state a long time ago.
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
Last I checked, spontaneous fission of hydrogen gas in canisters was a pretty rare occurance (i.e. it never happens). There's this thing, well, really, an electromagnetic potential wall, that stands between two happy hydrogen atoms trying to get together. We call it the Coulomb barrier. Protons, you see, don't like each other very much. And the closer they get to each other, the more they want to get away from each other.
So the best way to get some hanky panky going between two proton-rich nuclei is to force them together. And the only way to do that is to smash them up against each other with so much energy that even their electrical repulsion can't stand up to it.
That's where our friend plutonium comes in. All he needs is enough of himself and blamo! His nuclei destabilize, split apart, and go completely bonkers! Everything heats up REAL fast. So much energy is poured out of those nuclei that the temperature quickly reaches MILLIONS of degrees.
That's when hydrogen gets into the act. Plutonium's energy is just spilling over into everything, and hydrogen finally gets to the point where it begins to come together, releasing even more energy.
And that, my friend, is how you level a city in a small fraction of a second.
Somebody set up us the bomb.
Halliburton misplaces Americium in Massachusetts, fails to notify Nuclear Regulatory Commission within federally-mandated deadline.
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.
oops no, we got one
2 &cid=11709124
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13984
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
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.
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
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).
Yay! Devolution for Lancashire now! Stone the southern jessies! Stone them!
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But I'm Conroy's plant!
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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.
Fortunately, public ridicule saved the day.
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?
I found it on ebay, the starting bid is $25.00 and he will ship international.
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.
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.
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.
"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?