Free Republic

OAK RIDGE — A federal inspection found that Oak Ridge guards routinely worked excessive overtime and, in some instances, received less training than recommended for high-security nuclear installations. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General released the report today. The IG reviewed the Oak Ridge training program because of an allegation that a security police officer had received credit for training never received. The report said that allegation was confirmed and that an inspection turned up a number of other shortcomings. However, Wackenhut Services Inc., the government’s Oak Ridge security contractor, hotly disputed the IG findings. "We train...

Nuclear security under scrutiny By Gordon Corera BBC security correspondent Not all former Soviet nuclear sites have been fully secured The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, is holding a meeting on Wednesday to look at the security of nuclear arms and material.The London meeting comes amid growing fears that stockpiles have not been sufficiently protected from terrorists. The end of the Cold War left the former USSR with around 30,000 nuclear weapons and the material to build 80,000 more. But less than 50% of this has been fully secured - through reprocessing, better protection, or destruction....

Director accused of overreacting A Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist charged Friday that "national security has suffered demonstrably" and the nuclear weapons lab's reputation has been unjustly maligned because of director George "Pete" Nanos' decision in July to suspend work at the lab while cracking down on safety problems. The physicist, 32-year lab veteran Brad Lee Holian, has submitted a 1,500- word article outlining his charges to the journal Physics Today. The article has not yet been accepted for publication. Holian works in the T-12 division of the University of California-run lab in New Mexico. Contrary to Nanos' harsh public...

PADUCAH, Ky. (AP) -- A trucking company accidentally sent a shipment of diluted weapons-grade uranium to a North Carolina nuclear plant instead of its intended destination in Kentucky, but the mix-up posed no risk to anyone, officials said. The federal government is investigating how six metric tons of blended Russian uranium went to a nuclear fabrication plant in Wilmington, N.C., instead of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Transport Logistics International sent the load on Dec. 19 _ along with a similarly numbered load from a dock in Norfolk, Va. _ to Global Nuclear Fuel LLC in Wilmington, N.C. Rod Fisk,...

NIAMEY, Niger (AP) - Two or three times each week, a convoy of flatbed trucks loaded with drums of mined uranium heads south from the Sahara Desert in Niger on a 10-day journey to the port of Cotonou in neighbouring Benin. Two lightly armed Nigerien gendarmes accompany the tarp-covered trucks on their 1,995-kilometre trip. They have no satellite phones or other ways to communicate in case of trouble. On their prearranged stops for the night the drivers must notify the mining companies, but they take no special precautions to secure the drums against theft. This low-grade security for the powder...

Drinking and drug abuse make the danger of accidents and theft at nuclear facilities a severe problem, activists and sociologists said Monday. Citing what they called a crisis situation in the nuclear industry, members of Greenpeace and other groups urged the government to improve safety and security at existing sites instead of building more nuclear reactors. President Vladimir Putin stressed the importance of the nuclear sector for defense and power needs in January, and the Nuclear Power Ministry said two years ago that it wanted to build 20 new reactors by 2020 and double reliance on nuclear power -- which...