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Secret US List of Civil Nuclear Sites Released
eldavojohn writes "Someone accidentally released a 266-page report on hundreds of sites in the US for stockpiling and storing hazardous nuclear materials for civilian use. While some ex-officials and experts don't find it to be a serious breach, the Federation of American Scientists are calling it a 'a one-stop shop for information on US nuclear programs.' The document contains information about Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia, and opinions seem to be split on whether it's a harmless list or terrorist risk. One thing is for sure: it was taken down after the New York Times inquired to the Government Accountability Office about it."
how in the hell have there been so many serious leaks like this recently? why is no one being held accountable?
Nice juxtaposition:
Open Government Brainstorm Defies Wisdom of Crowds
Secret US List of Civil Nuclear Sites Released
The point of terrorism is to create terror, not necessarily by killing people or destroying large infrastructures. A single attack on a civilian nuclear facility, even if it didn't destroy or damage anything sensitive, could be enough to fuel the opponents of nuclear power and set the nuclear energy industry on the USA 50 more years back.
Dirty bombs are just too cumbersome. Radiation levels on that stuff are just way to high for some lunatic's bomb engineer to handle, are hard to transport and easily detectable.
Not really. The Three Mile Island accident was a mild, harmless incident in a nuclear energy facility but it is still used by nuclear energy opponents to denounce the "harms and perils" of the nuclear power.
While it's defiantly much harder to make a bomb from civilian nuclear material it's still possible and I'd guess a few skilled engineers (with no regard for their long-term health) could make one in less than 6 months. Spent nuclear fuel contains plutonium which is far easier to separate than the different isotopes of uranium as it can be done by chemical means. The plutonium would be heavily contaminated with Pu-240 which would cause some, not insurmountable, problems.
Implosion devices are out since they're so complicated to design and build which leaves us with the gun type bomb. This is usually considered impractical since the spontaneous fission of the Pu-240 causes the core to blow apart before it's maximum density is reached (fizzle), however a gun type device can be made, it just has to be much longer in order to bring the halves of the core together in a short enough time. This makes it impractical to drop from an aircraft or mount on a missile but such a device could be assembled inside, for example, a high rise office block on a floor chosen to match the airburst altitude for expected yield.
The bomb would probably still fizzle and produce a yield maybe a tenth that if pure Pu-239 could be used but that would be enough, maybe somewhere in the region of one kilo tonne.
Having said that I don't think that this list leaking is of much significance, all of this information was already available.
A quick scan of the .pdf file indicates..
Prototype Sodium cooled Fast reactor is wayyy off in the distant future 2020-2030 depending on funding. (Joint project with France and Japan.)
No projects involving thorium are on the drawing board.
A couple of projects involving reprocessing spent fuel.
That indicates that Nuclear power industry will likely be SOL by the end of the century, as the higher grade U-ore depsoits are mined out.