Whistling past the atomic graveyard
by Tom Sullivan
In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), physicist Richard Feynman explains that one of the early problems at Oak Ridge, TN during the Manhattan Project was that nobody processing the uranium really knew much about it or what it was for. As far as the Army brass was concerned, they didn't need to know. Except Feynman noticed plant workers storing large lots of processed uranium unsettlingly close together. Feynman observed, "Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see." And that would be, shall we say, bad. The staff could properly follow the handling rules only if they knew a modicum about what they were handling and how it works, Feynman knew. So J. Robert Oppenheimer had sent him to Oak Ridge to advise the plant how to handle and store the "stuff" safely. If he got any pushback, he was to say, Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless ...." He did. It worked like a charm.
Safety and security at America's nuclear facilities have always been concerns. Writing for New Yorker, Eric Schlosser provides more background on the 2012 break-in by Plowshares peace activists at the Y-12 uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. It's a lengthy piece detailing the group's motives, and it's less than reassuring about the security at American nuclear facilities:
On the night of the Y-12 break-in, a camera that would have enabled security personnel to spot the intruders was out of commission. According to a document obtained by Frank Munger, a reporter at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, about a fifth of the cameras on the fences surrounding the Protected Area were not working that night. One camera did capture someone climbing through a fence. But the security officer who might have seen the image was talking to another officer, not looking at his screen. Cameras and motion detectors at the site had been broken for months. The security equipment was maintained by Babcock & Wilcox, a private contractor that managed Y-12, while the officers who relied on the equipment worked for Wackenhut. Poor communication between the two companies contributed to long delays whenever something needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t always clear who was responsible for getting it fixed. The Plowshares activists did set off an alarm. But security officers ignored it, because hundreds of false alarms occurred at Y-12 every month. Officers stationed inside the uranium-storage facility heard the hammering on the wall. But they assumed that the sounds were being made by workmen doing maintenance.
There's much more, of course. But my mind immediately went to John McPhee's conversations with Los Alamos weapons designer, Ted Taylor, in The Curve of Binding Energy (1973). Taylor was worried then about terrorists clandestinely getting hold of poorly secured weapons material and fashioning a crude bomb. Carson Mark admitted blithely at the time, "So far as we know, everybody in the world who has tried to make a nuclear explosion since 1945 has succeeded on the first try." So, that's reassuring.
One of my own experiences informs my concern over how the "stuff" is handled.
One Thanksgiving weekend in the late 1990s, my wife and I were returning from seeing friends in Mount Pleasant, SC. It was late Sunday afternoon and traffic on I-26 would be bumper-to-bumper all the way to Columbia.
In North Charleston we overtook a tractor-trailer hauling four-foot diameter stainless steel casks. Lying on their sides and the width of the flatbed, it was unusual cargo. Pulling closer, we were able to read the printing on the rear cylinder: UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION – URANIUM HEXAFLUORIDE.
Brilliant. Some mastermind decided to move reactor fuel – reprocessed from Soviet nuclear warheads – out of Charleston to Paducah, KY on the busiest travel weekend of the year. Sunday, yeah. Traffic is light on Sundays.
My wife was unnerved tailgating nuclear materials and insisted we drive on ahead. Ahead were three more trucks like the first. In front, an unmarked, white conversion van had curtains drawn and interior lights on in the back. “Check out the driver,” I said as we pulled alongside. Black tee shirt and military crew cut. An armed detail with automatic weapons, probably. My wife had spotted an identical van at the rear of the convoy.