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."

Comments

glad they took it down.....

[Shakrai]

Now nobody will ever be able to find it ;)

Re:glad they took it down.....

[Ethanol-fueled]

Oh, well. At least they still have Google Earth to tell them, "Hey, terrorists, don't look here. There's nothing sekrit about our blurred base, move along."

jesus

[ilblissli]

how in the hell have there been so many serious leaks like this recently? why is no one being held accountable?

"for civilian use"

[wjh31]

there is a huge difference between nuclear material for civilian use, and weapons grade stuff. Even if some terrorists were able to get a-hold of civilian nuclear material they probably wouldnt be able to make a nuke. Having said that, a dirty bomb requires no expertese atall

Re:"for civilian use"

[dubiago]

There were some pretty hefty reassurances during the Clinton Administration about the nature of nuclear proliferation when they gave North Korea nuclear reactors; they'd never make nuclear weapons as a result of having the reactors. Flash forward to a week ago, and they've detonated a ~20KT nuclear device. Some of this may just be the government playing C.Y.A., and flashing a "Don't Panic" sign. And, as you point out, dirty bombs aren't that hard to make. They may not have the bang that their fission/fusion cousins have, but they'll certainly make you miserable.

Re:"for civilian use"

[vivaoporto]

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.

Re:"for civilian use"

[vivaoporto]

although I'm sure it would be back to normal once people had forgotten about it.

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.

Re:"for civilian use"

[Anonymous Coward]

set the nuclear energy industry on the USA 50 more years back

You mean we'd start building reactors again?

Re:"for civilian use"

[vlm]

Oh that irony: "Mild, harmless incident". Three Mile Island nearly blew off as later Chernobyl [wikipedia.org] - it was just luck that the crew found the error before.

Flat out blatant scaremongering misinformation.

Chernobyl used graphite as a moderator. Purified coal. Burns great. Perfect way to vaporize the fuel all over the countryside. No problem getting the smoke out of the containment dome, since they didn't have one.

TMI, like pretty much all non-Russian plants, uses water as a moderator. Not exactly a great fuel for vaporizing fuel rods. Containment dome designed to hold specifically for this situation. It worked as designed. Mild and harmless because it was designed to fail that way, and did.

I wont even bother listing differences like positive vs negative void coefficients that acted in our favor.

Also it was not luck that the TMI guys found the stuck valve... The third shift would have sat on their hinders all day in mystification because they had an inaccurate preconceived notion as to what is going on due to some broken equipment. Maybe they would have figured it out eventually, if they drank enough coffee, maybe not. However, the first shift guys came in with no preconceived notions to dispel, looked at all the gauges, more or less said "WTF were you thinking?", and shut it all down no problemo pretty much instantly.

Re:"for civilian use"

[sumdumass]

Three mile island was a design failure that has been addressed and fixed. The coolant leak which resulted in low coolant causing resulted in the wrong procedures being implemented and the suspect of faulty sensors. We now measure coolant levels not only in the feed, but in transition through the piping before and after the reactor. There are backup coolant lines to boot.

The entire issue that was behind TMI has been addresses and implemented into all other facilities and the type of incident has never been repeated.

I think the big picture is that once they realized the sensors wasn't at fault and the problem was a lack of coolant verses ineffective coolant-bad readings, figured out a plan, vented for safety and enacted the plan to control the reactor, the biggest problem was the lack of ability to evacuate the surrounding and potentially effected population. Roads were jammed, many people had no immediate transportation and the traffic problems was making it difficult to get buses into the area. The Three mile Island accidence is pretty much impossible to happen again, but it showed how impossible it was to protect the people at the same time.

Re:"for civilian use"

[paeanblack]

Three mile island was a design failure that has been addressed and fixed. The coolant leak which resulted in low coolant causing resulted in the wrong procedures being implemented and the suspect of faulty sensors. We now measure coolant levels not only in the feed, but in transition through the piping before and after the reactor. There are backup coolant lines to boot.

There will be another Three Mile Island-scale accident in the future
There will be another Exxon Valdez
There will be another Cleveland East
There will be another Tay Bridge, Tacoma Narrows, and Hyatt Regency
There will be another Bhopal
There will be another Tenerife, Saudia Tristar, and Aloha 243
There will be another St Francis Dam
There will be another Titanic

There will be another Chernobyl

Industrial/Engineering/Transportation disasters will continue to happen in every industry. Nuclear power is not immune.

However, arguing against nuclear power on that basis alone is like arguing against bridges and airplanes because they collapse and crash and kill people.

I think the big picture is that once they realized the sensors wasn't at fault and the problem was a lack of coolant verses ineffective coolant-bad readings, figured out a plan, vented for safety and enacted the plan to control the reactor, the biggest problem was the lack of ability to evacuate the surrounding and potentially effected population.

All of the disasters above have a commonality: people making decisions on incomplete information, because of the malfunction/poor maintenance of sensors/simple parts or the system entering an unanticipated state. Most of the time that this happens, people make the right decision, and the public doesn't hear about it. Sometimes the wrong decisions are made and people die.

The Three mile Island accidence is pretty much impossible to happen again

The exact same confluence of events that caused TMI will happen again and again. The technology will be different, but the people will be the same. The way to extend the intervals between major disasters is not be studying where the technology went wrong, but where the people went wrong. We'll never build another TMI-design reactor again, so the technical details are moot.

Re:"for civilian use"

[Chris Mattern]

That Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were completely different nuclear plants was not the point:

No, it's exactly the point.

The point was that Chernobyl exploded and caused many casualties and a highly contaminated environment, while Three Mile Island had luck.

No, Three Mile Island made several critical design decisions that prevented a massive disaster, and it had operators who could understand what they were looking at. That is not luck. That is the opposite of luck.

Not secret!

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez person writing the submission. RTFM. The list was not "secret". The guy clearly says that the list was only "sensitive" and could have been compiled from various public sources. He also clearly says that the breach was more embarrassing than a security problem.

Mirror

[Eddy Luten]

Since there's no link in TFA, here it is on WikiLeaks.

Let's be really honest here...

[DragonTHC]

If a clandestine organization has the funds, logistics, and operatives to carry out an attack on these facilities, they already know about them.

Who didn't know about los alamos, livermore, or sandia?

This would not happen in the UK....

[Chrisq]

We have a cunning plan to swamp terrorists with so many laptops, USB keys, DVDs, unformatted second-hand computers, external hard drives, secret documents held up to press photos, and so on that the chances of them finding anything of use top them among all the rest of the leaked data is insignificant.

Civil Nuclear Sites?

[vampire_baozi]

As the Times article pointed out, and from the looks of the PDF, most of this stuff was public domain already. All they did was assemble it into a nice condensed form for the IAEA. While documents that aren't supposed to be getting released getting released is clearly a process failure, this one doesn't seem particularly serious. On the scale of data leakages, far less harmful than the British government's loss of data discs containing personal information.

Given that most of the data was already public domain, beyond knowing specifically where the stuff is, what is new here? Figure out where the publication process went wrong, and how it got approved, and then take steps to fix the problem. Gov't snafu's are par for the course, and givin it was a civil report for the IAEA, looks like a minor leak if that.

I hardly forsee people trying to make dirty bombs from this stuff. As WikiLeaks notes, this information is far more useful to environmentalists than terrorists or foreign governments (to whom we're handing the info anyway via IAEA).

Re:/. wants the terrorists to win

[Chrisq]

We're geeks. We don't care if the terrorists win, just so long as Microsoft doesn't.

Re:incompetent government agency of an incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

The government has recently been a circus of one distraction after another. If they really wanted yet another distraction all they'd have to do is leak info about Sotomayor being a socialist (or a lesbian or an atheist, etc.) and the media wouldn't touch a real issue for months. Not that it matters. The American people are so inundated with manufactured outrage that we wouldn't know a genuine scandal if it bit us on the nose.

Re:hey guys...

[Kryis]

The last person to the whole 266-page report had to spend 3 weeks before they finally.

Re:Scary

[Speare]

The document was properly marked with "sensitive" flags, and the Government Printing Office posted it in error. GPO is part of the Legislative Branch, staffed by career civil servants, not political appointees. So saying that Obama's administration released it to the public is quite a stretch.