Nuclear Doesn’t Need More Black Eyes

At the bottom of it, it doesn’t matter that the amount of radioactive material lost in this particular instance is small.

Nor that it’s not enough to fashion a bomb.

Nor that it could be coated with candy and eaten by unicorns, who would then poop more exciting rainbows.

The fact that it was treated carelessly and then stolen and remains unaccounted for is a black eye on nuclear anything, period.

To sum up from the story:

Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.

Their task was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.

To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to calibrate them: specifically, a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could potentially be used in a so-called “dirty” radioactive bomb.

But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Highway 410, in a high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed and the special valises holding these sensors and nuclear materials had vanished.

Idiot instances like this will be another nail in the coffin of bringing any waste from Washington state or California to Idaho for treatment – even if doing so makes sense financially, as treatment facilities and crews that know how to work them already exist in Idaho. If the Department of Energy can’t keep track of a few samples of the bad stuff, who is to say the can handle transporting thousands of gallons of the stuff.

Particularly when the mishandling of such material by lab contractors appears to go unpunished.

And I know there are wagonloads of differences between the loss of this material and the safety precautions and checks and double checks and triple checks that would have to take place for any waste to come to Idaho for treatment. What matters is the perception, on a one-to-one ratio, for regulators and alarmists and Joe Six-Pack and Betty Housecoat to scuttle any deal that has the word “nuclear” in it.

Without a drop of waste coming – and still without knowing where the missing radioactive material has ended up – jobs are at stake and could likely be lost. Not those of the folks who lost the stuff, but those who could keep working safety and economically to treat waste from outside the state.

So what’s gotta happen?

Accountability. The Department of Energy, per this article, is pretty good at keeping non-Department folks in line with fines for losing or mishandling this bad stuff. Seems like the same rules ought to apply, and publicly.

Horse Sense. Nobody but nobody – even the noob writing this – should leave ANYTHING resembling a suitcase in a locked car overnight in a hotel parking lot. This is elementary security, folks.

NOTE: I’m saying this as a private citizen, and am not in any way speaking for the company I work for. I do work in the nuclear industry, but on the waste cleanup side.