Dec 20 2007
Nuclear Materials Overseas Not Protected
There are serious problems with the protection of weapons grade nuclear materials, as illustrated by this shocking story of four sophisticated intruders rummaging around a South African nuclear plant for almost an hour before being accidentally discovered by an off duty guard. This incursion is a clear sign the wrong people can possibly get their hands on some very dangerous material. I know security will be increased at plants across the world, but the problem is security becomes a fixed pattern, which means it can be beaten. Security needs to be randomly dynamic so by the time plans are made the security pattern has changed.
What is even worse is if you look at the storage areas in Russia for all the weapons that were taken apart under the Salt and Start treaties.
They are in low security warehouses and just sitting there along with a lot of reactor cores from the dozens of nuclear subs that they retired because of lack of funds to run them at the end of the cold war.
Under the treaties, we help pay for that storage and we import the weapons grade material and process it back down for use in civilian plants to refuel them.
We have the technology to directly use weapons grade stuff in power reactors so it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to go through all the trouble and expense to process it down but that is what we do.