Secret US List of Civil Nuclear Sites Released 167
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."
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:glad they took it down..... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're suggesting the selective blurring of the base in the older imagery was a coincidence? It was blurrier than other imagery of neighboring areas from the same time period...
So I think a better hypothesis is, there was/is an informal agreement, but when updated photography came in somebody goofed up and didn't re-blur it before re-applying it.
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Maybe the people who built the building didn't do it right, and the building itself is blurry.
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http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Obama_IAEA_nuclear_sites_declaration_for_the_United_States%2C_draft%2C_267_pages%2C_5_May_2009
jesus (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:jesus (Score:4, Interesting)
put down your pitchforks (Score:4, Insightful)
If you vigilantes sit still for a second and actually RTFA you'll see that there aren't any "national secrets" that were leaked here -- this information was "sensitive" and its release is embarrassing at best, but hardly a hanging offense.
On another note, I wonder if you felt the same way about the leak of a covert agent's identity during the Bush Administration? Were you hoping to see Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney in a noose?
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No, I was and still am hoping to see Libby, Rove and Cheney in three separate nooses, please. I'm sure that even in times of financial crisis, the US of A should have enough money to buy each high traitor to the country a rope of his own.
Although, on second thought, I'd be OK with having them hung serially with the same rope.
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Sure. The person(s) responsible should face consequences.
Were you hoping to see Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney in a noose?
No, because they weren't the ones responsible. It was Novak, if I recall correctly, who leaked the information. Some news reporter. And it wasn't as if Plame herself was big on keeping it a secret. It wasn't a secret that she worked for the CIA. If
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I'm afraid the Plame-outing meme has stuck on, hard. Repeat a story enough and it is taken to be true in its entirety.
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It's completely false that Plame didn't care if people knew -- as you should know from news reports at the time, she was actually engaged in covert operations involving WMD and Iran, operations that were probably blown along with her cover. Yes Novak reported it but he didn't figure it out on his own. It wasn't "blown up" by anyone with "hatred for the administration." Are you kidding me? Who do you mean, Patrick Fitzgerald? or the CIA?
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Ultimately the real war should be psychological, about the root causes of what angers somebody against someone else, and the tensions eased. Sometimes however, you might find yourself handpicked into a situation where the tensions are
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As much as I like to ding the O
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"for civilian use" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"for civilian use" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:"for civilian use" (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. The Three Mile Island accident [wikipedia.org] 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.
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The people who point out 3 mile island as why nuclear is really dangerous are of the same mob as the people who want to close down the LHC because it might attract the attention of the Mutant Stellar Goat.
No, you are absolutely wrong. The Three Mile Island incident has clearly shown that you can actually lose control over your reactor, and that this can cause a real accident. I do not think that you can find any scientist who will deny this. On the other hand, the black hole rhetoric of the LHC critics is all but scientific.
Re:"for civilian use" (Score:5, Informative)
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" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I could not agree more with you. You can learn from disasters, but there is no such technology that can prevent disasters completely.
What you can do, is trying to reduce complexity from technology that is potentially dangerous. This and trying to get more direct information instead of indirect information (e.g. being able to actually see the water in the TMI case would have prevented that the incident went into out of control). Complexity, dependencies, and indirections greatly increases the likelihood t
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The three mile island incident happened because a stuck valve ended up restricting or losing coolant and the result was something that indicated another situation entirely. This same situation used to be the downfall of cars too and the fix was pretty much the same.
In the cars, there was simply a temperature gauge that measured coolant temp. when the coolant was missing, it wouldn't show the engine over heating and you didn't know anything was wrong until damage started happening. Now they put coolant level
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I admire your effort and appreciate the apparent pro-nuclear stance. But please check out the NRC Fact Sheet [nrc.gov] on TMI Unit 2 (Unit 1 is doing just fine, thanks) for more precise details on the cause and sequence of events for the accident. You'll find some useful facts that will correct some of your misconceptions about the contributing factors and root causes of the event.
In my opinion, the most dominant root cause was inadequate operator training. The stuck-open primary valve (PORV) was misdia
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You think the Gods of Olympus, or the powers that be today, don't get bored sometimes and play with real people's live
Re:"for civilian use" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were completely different nuclear plants was not the point: The point was that Chernobyl exploded and caused many casualties and a highly contaminated environment, while Three Mile Island had luck.
Saying that it was not luck, because the next shift would have done something differently, is pure speculation. However it is no speculation that the TMI accident was very critical and nearly out of control. The next shift would not have had much time to gain control again.
Re:"for civilian use" (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's exactly the point.
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.
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Point was: If TMI blew off, the disaster would have been comparable to Chernobyl.
I agree that TMI had a better design that proved to be good enough to delay the disaster long enough - so that the operators finally found the issue. On the other hand the design proved to be bad enough that the incident became out of control. And regaining the control was luck, because the operators were clueless before they luckily discovered that the instruments were broken.
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The differences in the plants seems to make a big difference. It seems one was designed to reduce what would happen if something went wrong, and the other not so much. Seems misleading to overlook that, wouldn't you agree?
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The differences in the plants seems to make a big difference. It seems one was designed to reduce what would happen if something went wrong, and the other not so much. Seems misleading to overlook that, wouldn't you agree?
I agree, if you could agree that TMI had the potential for disaster. And this is regardless whether you compare it to Chernobyl or not.
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The US National Reactor Testing Station which is now the Idaho National Lab performed the Loss of Fluid Tests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_response_to_reactor_accidents#LOFT) to better understand what a loss of coolant accident would mean (http://en.wikipedi
Re:"for civilian use" (Score:5, Funny)
set the nuclear energy industry on the USA 50 more years back
You mean we'd start building reactors again?
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[...] could be enough to fuel the opponents of nuclear power [...]
Woah! That's worth exploiting, don't you think?
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Of course, I don't happen to *know* of any terrorist groups whose main agenda is against the nuclear power industry.
Is this sarcasm or something?
It's not that long ago that anti-nuke demonstrations were frequent and highly visible. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Events [wikipedia.org] . I'm certain that the possibility of anti-nuke terrorism is very high in the minds of nuke management.
Re:"for civilian use" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dirty bombs are a joke. All the radiation goes away after some basic clean up. I suspect the dirty bomb was invented by the CIA to trick the jihadis.
A better plan is just get untrained jihadis to hide the shit all over NYC, like the chairs in cinemas, stoves of fancy restaurants, the cart of some guy selling pizza on the street, shove it down the pipes in hotels, stick it up the ass of a police horse, etc. You then wait 6 months and call the press. A few people have actually been mildly irritated by the
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I vote for taking out North Korea today. I'd rather have a 100,000+ casualties today if it can prevent the likely horrific death of 20 million+ later.
What if it can't? What if it just sends the millions of survivors into the death-to-america mindset instead, providing anti-american terrorists a flood of recruits, labor, and funding. And a few years they detonate a nuke in a major city anyway.
"Take out X", that only creates more terrorism, unless you plan to exterminate everyone on the planet but you.
The way
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We've been "building bridges" ever since WW2. It doesn't appear to have done any great good.
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We've been "building bridges" ever since WW2.
Yes. We've built a lot of bridges and they've paid off. We've also blown a few up, with less positive effects.
It doesn't appear to have done any great good.
The cold war ended peacefully, there was no WW3.
Your standards are too high for these not to be 'great good'.
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The Cold War ended largely because Reagan maneuvered the USSR into economic collapse. Bridges, built or blown up, had nothing to do with that.
Now we're "building bridges" to China, and they're taking our economy to the cleaners.
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Spoken like a true American.
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I vote for letting Seoul and Tokyo decide that on their own. It's not like the Japanese and Koreans are ignorant savages that need smart white man to tell them how much their lives are worth.
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1) It sounds like a problem for South Korea and Japan, not the USA or the rest of the world. IF Japan, South Korea, or any other Country i nthe region wants to take out N. Korea's nuclear program, go ahead.
2) What do you mean by "take out North Korea"? Kill every citizen? That's a lot more then 100,000K. An Invasion/war? They have ~ 1 million strong army. Going to be a few more then ~100,000K deaths there. And then what do you do once you've "lib
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Having said that, a dirty bomb requires no expertese atall
Having said that, a dirty bomb requires nothing more than a few dozen smoke detectors, and if They didn't want to pay for it, the wal-mart down the street almost certainly has lower security than any of the facilities listed.
"The List" doesn't tell most people anything they couldn't already find out themselves if they wanted to (oh look, I can buy this stuff online [unitednuclear.com]).
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Having said that, a dirty bomb requires nothing more than a few dozen smoke detectors,
No need for that, a granite countertop will do. Many granites are quite strongly radioactive compared to background radiation and are easily detectable using off the shelf geiger counters.
Alpha emitter smoke detectors will not work. Alphas are great for smoke detectors, after all, smoke isn't very dense, so there is a huge signal difference between "clean" and "smokey" air. But that makes it too hard to detect from far away, like more than a foot or so. Wave a cheap beta/gamma-only counter a couple feet
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Or go out into the California desert and mine your own. No one will notice.
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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'r
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I dirty bomb requires significant expertise if you want to avoid being killed transporting the bomb. Imagine material so hot that its mere radioactivity could endanger a wide area, then concentrate it into the size of a bomb. Plus, dirty bombs are very easy to detect.
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Alpha emitters are the most harmful it ingested. They are also the easiest to shield. A cardboard box would probably do the trick. If you could get hold of the right materials a "dirty bomb" could equate to a moderatly sized firework.
Not secret! (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Scary (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes, Obama accidentally the document.
Here is the document blurb:
To the Congress of the United States:
I transmit herewith a list of the sites, locations, facilities, and activities
in the United States that I intend to declare to the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), under the Protocol Additional
to the Agreement between the United States of America and
the International Atomic Energy Agency for the Application of
Safeguards in the United States of America, with Annexes, signed
at Vienna on June 12, 1998
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Most important part:
"Sensitive but Unclassified"
Atom experts say it is not such a big deal as the information revealed was already roughly known.
Source: My local news website.
It was a draft for the IAEA (International Atom Energy Agency).
Re:Scary (Score:5, Informative)
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Yes, Obama accidentally the document.
Did he accidentally the whole thing?
it is kind of a no big deal (Score:4, Informative)
say the list was kept perfectly secret. as if no one who intends harm couldn't ferret out where the sites are. its not as if the sites are very mobile, most have been there for decades
and none of the material is easily weaponized. well, you could build a dirty bomb. but if you were building a dirty bomb, it would be easier to shop used medical equipment. perhaps from outside the country. i'm sure you could find some old radiology equipment in latin america and sneak it over the mexican border undetected. line it with lead and drive it in. pack it with some dynamite in a city center: boom, instant radioactive times square
finally, even if the sites were kept secret, they still need to be guarded. that's the real safeguard
although the list does allow those who intend to do harm confirmation of sites, and an ability to triage which is easier than another to attempt to breach
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Have to be pretty f*cking old radiology equipment, as the last cobalt machines probably went out of production something like 30 years ago. Today they generate X-rays electrically.
its not just the x-ray machines (Score:2)
radiotherapy for cancer, markers/indicators in various diagnostic tests, positron emission tomography, etc.
of course a lot of these sources are extremely dilute, or have a very short half life. the dilution problem can be solved by a committed asshole, and there are also plenty of health care radioactivity uses that do not involve short lived isotopes
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There are a few cases where machines like this have escaped into the wild and caused problems. I'm sure I read one recently where a fairly strong radioactive source used for radiotherapy had been left in a disused hospital and taken by someone. See also people selling bits of RTGs for scrap, people dumping industrial radiation sources in scrapyards (hey, that was on House!) etc. etc. Lots of nasty nukular material out there without any need to go near a nuclear 'facility'
what you are referring to: (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi [wikipedia.org]ânia_accident
link is from another commenter in this same thread. one of the worst nuclear disasters ever. note: link may not work because it contains portuguese characters and fucking slashdot doesn't use unicode encoding yet. welcome to 1994. follow the link and go to "search for..." and wikipedia will resolve it to the right article
as for house: i remember that episode. ll cool jay was the actor and he found a cool piece of metal in the trashyard he worked and hung it
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Well I never heard of that but it was quite interesting. btw I don't see the problem with posting the URL in HTML mode, try Goiânia Accident [wikipedia.org]
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It was the cancer treatment machines I was referring to. They generally produce X-rays as well, albeit at a substantially higher power than the ones used for diagnostic purposes.
that's good news then (Score:2)
unfortunately old machinery is probably still in use in poor countries, or comes back from the dead in unpredictable ways, like this nightmare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi [wikipedia.org]ânia_accident
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that's already happened (Score:2)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Traces_of_radiation_found_where_Litvinenko_ate [wikinews.org]
there are many ways to terrorize with radioactive material. but
plus side #1: it tends to get washed away after a few rains. nagasaki and hiroshima were nuked with plutonium, and they aren't permanently uninhabitable, or even radioactive above background radiation that much. although, something like chernobyl is different. it depends upon the type of radioactive element and how it is dispersed
plus side #2: any high profile place that a
huh? (Score:2)
"Seriously, we're doomed if we rely on the Federal Government to protect us"
who the hell is going to do the job?
"I mean a terrorist just shot two US soldiers in our country and the President hasn't even addressed it. What better way to terrorize our nation then to shoot soldiers are random when they should be safe. The stress of being in Iraq/Afghanistan is bad enough, but now they need to worry about getting shoot back at home?"
almost every year, some student goes nuts and shoots up a campus. but i don't s
Let's be really honest here... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Or any hospital with a radiology department, or any college offering a nuclear energy engineering degree, etc.
What's actually going on is a battle inside the government over how to excuse our defenses using two diametrically opposed strategies. Its good to see a failure of cooperation in the government, that gives some hope to the citizens.
One govt spokes-clown talks up inadequate defenses by making fun of the opposition. The idea is to compare the opposition to a bad mork and mindy episode or some other
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[tightening my tinfoil hat]
Or they generate failures to demonstrate the need for tighter security measures on the citizenry...
Civil Nuclear Sites? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
hey guys... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:hey guys... (Score:5, Funny)
Work of Jack Bauer. (Score:2)
So that is how Luke found out. (Score:4, Funny)
The real problem here (Score:3, Funny)
I think the real problem here is that there are nuclear materials being stockpiled for civilian use !
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Nuclear tourism (Score:2)
Not only are most of those places well known, there are even tours. There's a nostalgic interest in nuclear tourism [nuclearvacation.com], visiting the interesting Cold War spots.
I misread this as... (Score:2)
Secret US List of Civil War Nuclear Sites Released
---
Abraham Lincoln scowled and told his generals, "I don't care if it will give us a quick victory to nuke Atlanta. I will not condone the use of nuclear weapons on the continent!"
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We'll try to stay serene and calm, when Alabama gets the bomb. [youtube.com]
DOE ....Thanks for update... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
whew! (Score:2)
Whew... at least only the list was secret and not the nuclear sites. That would have been embarrassing!
Nothing to see here... (Score:2)
Apparently even though something like this makes you cringe, it has been dubbed as not really that critical in nature, and even though
you would have at the most materials to make a dirty bomb, it would take too much effort to counter all the security in place, as well as the motion activated satellite images of surroundings, leading you to know about an intrusion way before it is a problem.
Usually, the MIB answer these calls, and they are usually very quick to intercept.
This would not happen in the UK.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:/. wants the terrorists to win (Score:5, Funny)
Re:incompetent government agency of an incompetent (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
if this wasn't posted AC (Score:4, Funny)
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The government has recently been a circus of one distraction after another.
Yeah, health care, the economy, and Afghanistan are distractions to the real issues facing America: why didn't Lambert win American idol? Will Michael Vick play football again? And why didn't the president asked for change when he got a hamburger [tmz.com]?
I demand real answers to these very real questions facing America!
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