A stockpile of plutonium and other nuclear weapons materials stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory hasn’t been fully accounted for in 13 years or more, a government audit has found.
An inventory of all the material hasn’t been done in “perhaps 13 years or more,” Friedman wrote. It wasn’t even done when the lab’s management contract changed last year, investigators noted in the report made public Wednesday.
“The capability to deter, detect and assist in the prevention of theft or diversion of this material is critical,” Friedman wrote. Yet, he added: “We were unable to find anyone with knowledge or documentation of the last time the vault was completely inventoried.”
Among the other problems auditors found: Some lab employees don’t follow instructions for how to develop identification numbers for the materials so they are easily identified. For example, auditors said one system was based on characters in a movie that a technician had just seen.
Does this mean that CP3O is more relevant than we all thought?
With the “stockpile” of incompetents and 19th Century ideologues we’ve built up in Congress and the White House – understand that we’ve actually reached a point in the governing of the United States where bureaucrats hate and fear beancounters.
Who cares? There isn’t anyone out there who would want some dusty old plutonium anyway…
I winder why the final scene in the first Indian Jones movie comes to mind here? One guy, big storage area, cryptic comment from bureaucrat that “it is being dealt with by top people”.
interesting thing about plutonium is one picogram of it inside you is a lethal dose. So it doesn’t take much missing to produce a significant health scare in the populous.
#2 – OFTLO,
You have such a way with words …
Dusty old plutonium … It’s not just the plutonium that’s going to be radioactive dust if we’re not careful.
Hopefully someone is using it to dust the Mexican border.
Don’t you mean C3PO??
Are you trying to impress me with the STUPIDITY of what our gov is doing??
Stop trying, and Im not impressed.
Our gov has so much to do, and has made itself OWNER of so many problems that it cant tell the diff between a Hole in the ground and its Own Spit hole.
I would THINK that we could find volunteers that would willingly monitor this type of problem for little or nothing.
I like how the gov. tends to FORCE things upon us and business, and STILL cant control or monitor itself in a LIKE fashion.
Its asif these folks are in a dream, ‘labyrinth’, they dont know WHERE and WHAt has been done in the past, or what will be SLAPPING them in the face in the future, and the present is a mystery.
Hey, maybe Saddam stole some and used it for his WMDs?
Oh wait, Saddam’s dead, and he didn’t have any WMDs to begin with.
No matter, no problem. IT COULD HAVE happened. We need another SURGE. Bring it on! We need an excuse…any excuse will do…President Cheney doesn’t have his chickenhawk claws firmly implanted in those oil profits yet.