Dounreay 'loses' bomb-grade uranium

Well this is nice. And just how does one loose hightly radioactive material in the first place? Read on and find out.

THE Dounreay nuclear plant has lost more than half a pound of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the material used to make nuclear weapons.
Official government figures show that during an internal audit of UK nuclear sites over the last year, technicians at the Caithness site could not account for some 283g of HEU.
Another nuclear plant, Winfrith in Dorset, has also mislaid some HEU, the audit found.
The material is at the heart of the crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Intense diplomatic efforts by western nations and the United Nations are focused on stopping the Iranian government producing HEU in its nuclear power programme.
The discrepancies in stores of radioactive material were revealed in the Department of Trade and Industry's annual Nuclear Materials Balance survey.
The audit has previously shown even larger gaps in the nuclear balance-sheet. Last year, the Sellafield plant in Cumbria could not account for more than 30kg of plutonium.
The government insists that the missing material is not a cause for concern, trying to depict it as "paper losses".
"Whenever nuclear material is measured there is an uncertainty associated with the measurement," the DTI said. The losses at Dounreay and other plans "conform to the pattern over previous years and give no rise to concern over either the safety or the security of the operation of the plants".
However, as the DTI admits in a briefing document on the findings, the audit process leaves open the possibility that the "lost" material is physically missing. "Theft of small amounts of material cannot be detected by nuclear materials accountancy alone," the document says.
Frank Barnaby, a former government nuclear scientist who now works at the Oxford Research Group, a think-tank, said that the uncertainty "should worry us very much".
He said: "The fact is that they can't tell whether the material within these 'unaccounted for' margins is missing or has been stolen - there is no certainty at all about where this material is."
While the amount of missing uranium would not be enough for a conventional nuclear device, it could be used in a "dirty bomb", in which a conventional explosive blast is used to scatter radioactive particles.
Read the rest here.

Oh OK. So maybe it's lost but then again, maybe it's not. Who knows? It's comforting to know that it can "only" be made into a "diry bomb" and not a full fledged one. Real comforting.