Secrets Released!

by Cheryl Rofer

The New York Times and Washington Post are all a-twitter (can we say that with the old meaning any more?) over a document from the United States Government to the International Atomic Energy Agency that was posted on the internet by the GPO. The document is the list of nuclear sites declared by the United States for nuclear safeguarding.

Damn! I had it in a tab the other day, and I didn't save it. I wanted to check out what facilities were open to IAEA inspection. The answer would probably be fewer than most people think. But it's gone now.

There is a conflict between making information available to inform citizens and being a patsy for the terrorists. The pendulum swung too far from making information available during the Bush years, although I believe that lists like this have been kept from the public pretty much forever.

I suspect that this document would have been much more helpful for informing citizens than for planning terror attacks. Anybody who cares about the matter knows that Y-12, at Oak Ridge, is the "Fort Knox of enriched uranium."

Some of the reports claim that there were maps, but I suspect that in a document of this kind, the maps are of dots on states, rather than of sites showing the exact locations of sensitive materials. The terrorists know where Oak Ridge is, too.

It's important for United States citizens to understand that the IAEA does not inspect all nuclear sites in the United States, that many sites are excluded because of relationships to weapon development and manufacturing. That's one of the inequities that nations like Iran complain about. This document would show that.

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And, by the way, Bill Broad, please be more careful in the use of the word "fuel" in regard to nuclear weapons. It's confusing: we have fuel for reactors and now you (and others in the media) are referring to fuel for nuclear weapons. At a very basic level (sort of like that Colorado is rotten with uranium-235), that's accurate. Both reactors and nuclear weapons operate with uranium-235 and plutonium. But the fuel for reactors is a complex mixture of those fissionable materials (that's a phrase you could use!) in chemical coupounds. The fuel for weapons is the metallic elements.

Using the same word for both seems to imply that the fuel for a reactor might be stolen and directly used in weapons. It would, in fact, take quite a bit of chemical and physical processing to get from one to the other. It's almost reminiscent of that story in the Times about aluminum tubes that might have been used for one thing or another, the differences not carefully distinguished.