Plutonium missing; government silent
Security experts left radioactive material in their vehicle at a San Antonio hotel, and it disappeared.
Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.
Their task, according to documents and interviews, was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.
To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to cal
ibrate them: a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could be used in a so-called “dirty” radioactive bomb.
But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Interstate 410, in a high-crime
neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedi- tion. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed, and the special valises holding the sensors and nuclear mate- rials had vanished.
More than a year later, state and federal officials don’t know where the plu- tonium — one of the most valuable and dangerous substances on earth — is. Nor has the cesium been recovered.
No public announcement of the March 21, 2017, incident has been made by either the San Antonio police or the FBI, which the police consulted by telephone. When asked, officials at the lab and in San Antonio declined to say exactly how much plutonium and cesium were miss-
ing. But Idaho lab spokeswoman Sarah Neumann said the plutonium in particular wasn’t enough to be fash- ioned into a nuclear bomb.
It is nonetheless now part of a much larger amount of plutonium that over the years has quietly disappeared from stockpiles owned by the U.S.
military, often without any public notice.
Unlike civilian stocks, which are closely monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and openly regulated — with reports of thefts or disappearances sent to an international agency in Vienna — the handling of military stocks tended by the Department of Energy is much less transparent.
The Energy Department, which declined to comment to the Center for Public Integ- rity for this story, doesn’t talk about instances of lost and stolen nuclear material produced for the military. It also has been less willing than the commission to punish its contractors when they
lose track of such material, several incidents suggest.
Just a cat or a brick
Gaps have shown up at multiple nodes in the production and deployment cycle for nuclear arms: at factories where plutonium and highly enriched uranium have been made, at storage sites where the materials are held in reserve, at research centers where the materi- als are loaned for study, at waste sites where they are disposed of, and during tran- sit between many of these facilities.
Production of the bomb materials was so frantic during the Cold War that a total of roughly 6 tons of the material — enough to fuel hundreds of nuclear explo- sives — has been declared MUF (or material unaccounted for) by the govern- ment, with most of it presumed to have been trapped in factory pipes, filters and machines, or improperly logged in paperwork.
The Government Accountability Office declared in September 2015 that the Energy Department had never conducted an authoritative inventory of the location and quantity of plutonium loaned by the United States to other nations, and that 11 foreign sites with U.S.-made bomb-grade uranium had not been visited by U.S. inspectors in the previous 20 years. Many sites inspected before 2010 lacked rigorous security systems, the GAO warned.
Asked for comment, National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Greg Wolfe said in an email June 29 that his agency is still working with the department on that inventory three years later. He did not say when it would be finished.
Regarding transfers to academic researchers, government agencies or commercial firms within the United States, the Energy Department’s inspector general concluded in 2009 — the most recent public account-
ing — that at least a pound of plutonium and 45 pounds of highly enriched uranium loaned from military stocks had been officially listed until 2004 as securely stored, when in fact it was missing.
As little as 9 pounds of highly enriched uranium (the weight of an average cat) or 7 pounds of plutonium (the weight of a brick) can produce a functioning nuclear warhead, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
Sloppiness in transit
In the San Antonio inci- dent, police were dumb- founded that the experts from Idaho did not take more precautions. They “should have never left a sensitive instrument like this unattended in a vehicle,” said Carlos Ortiz, spokesman for the San Antonio Police Department.
The personnel from Idaho National Laboratory whose gear was stolen were part of the Off-Site Radioac- tive Source Recovery Program based at Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico. Overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the program has scooped up more than 38,000 bits of radioactive material lent to research centers, hospitals and academic institutions since 1999 — averaging 70 such missions a year.
No other state has returned more borrowed nuclear materials than Texas, where the recovery program has
collected 8,566 items. Details of the incident were pieced together by the Center for Public Integrity from a
police report obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request after a brief description of the incident appeared in an internal Energy Depart- ment report.
While Idaho National Laboratory depicted the site of the theft — a Marriott hotel parking lot — in a report to the Energy Department as a secure spot with high walls on two sides, a clear line of sight to the hotel’s front door and patrolling guards, San Antonio police statistics show that the theft was just one of 87 at that hotel or its parking lot in 2016 and 2017.
Ortiz said the department called an FBI liaison to a joint terrorism task force, who advised them to take as many fingerprints in the car as possible. But detec- tives found no usable prints, no worthwhile surveillance video of the crime and no witnesses. A check of local pawn shops to see if some-
one had tried to sell the sen-
sors turned up nothing.
One of the Idaho National Laboratory specialists told t hem “that it wasn’t an important or dangerous amount” of plutonium, so they closed the investigation to avoid “chasing a ghost,” Ortiz said.
Idaho National Laboratory spokeswoman Sarah Neumann responded that “from INL’s perspective, the theft was taken seriously”
and properly reported to the police and the Energy Department. She declined to say whether those involved faced any internal consequences.
“There is little or no danger from these sources being in the public domain,” she said.
Lab documents state that a month after the incident,
one of the specialists charged with safeguarding the equipment in San Antonio was given a “Vision Award” by her colleagues. “Their achievements, and
those of their colleagues at the laboratory, are the reasons our fellow citizens look to INL to resolve the nation’s
big energy and security challenges,” Mark Peters, the lab
director, said in an April 21, 2017, news release.
At the end of the 2017 fiscal year, the Energy Department awarded the lab contractor that employed the guards assigned to pick up the nuclear material, Battelle Energy Alliance LLC, an “A” grade and described their overall performance as “excellent.”
It further awarded them 97 percent of their available bonuses, providing $15.5 million in profit, and in December 2017 the Energy Department announced a five-year extension of Battelle’s contract to operate Idaho National Laboratory, giving the contractor the job until at least 2024.