Missing plutonium

[bwh]

Heard as I was waking up: 30 kg of plutonium is unaccounted for at Sellafield. But the audit "does not represent any material going missing", according to the DTI. So that's OK then. Obviously they have another set of accounts that explains it all, but which they can't show us, since otherwise they couldn't possibly know.

For reference, that's 7 bombs' worth.

Comments

[songster.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, not sure I agree with you.

Remember, they're processing spent fuel to extract plutonium. "Material unaccounted for" could simply be the difference between what they expected to recover from the fuel rods and what they actually did recover. Possibly the stuff being sent to then simply contains less plutonium than expected?

I don't find it beyond the realms of possibility that they can prove they haven't had anything taken from the plant, yet not be sure why they have less plutonium than they should. The last paragraph of the report would seem to indicate this is the issue here.

[artela.livejournal.com]

The news report I heard on R4 this morning intimated that the problem may be with "inaccuracies in measurements during recovery"... if the inaccuracies are all in the same direction then that could account for such a discrepancy.

[womble2.livejournal.com]

It seems like a strange kind of audit then, or maybe it's just typically distorted reporting.