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Kalius
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Kriegsgewitter
Aug 2002
time: 16:24
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4272691.stm
quote:
Enough plutonium to make seven nuclear bombs is unaccounted for in the records of Sellafield power station, British Nuclear Group is expected to announce.
The Times claims an annual audit due to be published later will show that 30kg of plutonium is classified as "material unaccounted for" during 2004.
A BBC correspondent expected British Nuclear Fuels to admit a "paper loss".
And the Department of Trade and Industry said the audit "does not represent any material going missing".
The discrepancy, which compares with a 19kg discrepancy at the plant in 2003, is expected to embarrass the British Nuclear Group, which manages the facility.
In a statement, the DTI said: "This is an accounting process.
"It's not unusual for the accounting process to indicate material unaccounted for.
"Again, it's not an indication of any missing material."
Plutonium is a man-made radioactive metal that can be used as a nuclear fuel and a nuclear weapon.
Sellafield processes thousands of tons of nuclear material every year.
British Nuclear Fuels, the parent company of BNG, is yet to comment on the situation but are expected to do so on Thursday.
'Dramatic development'
BBC Science Correspondent Sue Nelson said the company is expected to play down any fears by saying that any unaccounted materials will be "within the standards of allowed measurement inaccuracies".
They are expected to play down fears by saying it is a "paper loss", rather than a physical one, she said.
Dr Frank Barnaby, a nuclear weapons specialist, told the Times: "There will always be some material unaccounted for but this is a dramatic development.
"This is a major reason for not reprocessing spent nuclear fuel because you can't tell what the material unaccounted for is." |
How can you downplay the loss of seven bombs worth of plutonium!? Awfully scary.
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Cruddy
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Those figures look screwy to me. I thought it took about 30 kilos plus of material to make one bomb.
Critical mass and all that... any atom physics heads around?
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child of Thor
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I guess this is one of the problems with using nuclear power as an energy source?
They'll probably find that the 30kgs never exsited in the first place, probably an error when they were updateing some database figures that the 'temp' made, or something like that. At least one hopes that's the case.
There hasn't been much of a fuss over this here yet, which is strange.
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child of Thor
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quote:
Originally posted by Dauphin
Its not like a the loss in blocks of materail. Its due to what is effectively a back of the envelope estimate of how much plutonium should have leached out of the recycled material.
quote:
The process then involves cutting up the fuel rods, dissolving them in acid and then separating the solution into three streams — uranium, plutonium, and high-level waste.
At each stage of the process the material is weighed and calculations made of the amounts of plutonium it contains. All this has to be done remotely behind shielding because of the radioactivity involved.
At the end of the process the weight of the plutonium recovered ought to balance with the estimates of the amount put in. They seldom do, but the discrepancy is rarely as large as it is this year. |
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So from those last two paragraphs it would seem that its merely a bean-counting error? It has to be right? How could someone siphone of 30kgs of highly radiactive material and smuggle it out of the power plant(this is what we're all worried about after all)?
It's not really possible is it, mostly due to how nasty the stuff is to handle and move around?
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17-02-2005 12:21
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