But embedded in its 164 pages was the following intriguing revelation:
"Early in the reporting year, a number of security events required us to apply regulatory attention to several of Sellafield Ltd's security investigations."
It then added: " Appropriate lessons have been identified and we will continue our regulatory focus on security culture and on influencing improvements in the security competence of the internal assurance function."
Sellafield is a big nuclear site that, inter alia, holds 140,000 kilogrammes of plutonium. A devastating warhead can be made with just 5kgs
We cannot afford any serious security even ts at Sellafield!
Below is a salutary tale of trying t find the uranium cubes lost from the Nazi nuclear bomb programme, to show how sensitive nuclear material can go missing for decades...
Where in the world are Nazi Germany’s uranium cubes?
Hundreds of the hand-size blocks were created for nuclear reactor research by German scientists during World War II. Physics Today tracked down several of them, but most are still AWOL.
Alex Lopatka Andrew Grant
In the 1940s Werner Heisenberg and his German colleagues built an experimental nuclear reactor that incorporated chains of uranium cubes, similar to these replicas displayed in the Atomkeller Museum in Haigerloch, Germany. Though hundreds of the cubes were produced, we don’t know where most of them are today. Credit: Felix König, CC BY 3.0In April 1945, Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves coordinated a daring exercise behind enemy lines in Germany. The objective of the mission, called Alsos, was to gather intelligence about the German nuclear research program, which involved the likes of Kurt Diebner, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, and leader Werner Heisenberg. The Alsos team, which included physicists such as Samuel Goudsmit, found more than just information; they discovered an experimental laboratory in the southwest German town of Haigerloch, where they recovered 659 uranium cubes that had been produced for an ultimately unsuccessful nuclear reactor.
In the May issue of Physics Today, Timothy Koeth and Miriam Hiebert from the University of Maryland describe the history of one of those cubes. But the fate of the vast majority of the other cubes, including another 400 or so that weren’t recovered by the Alsos team, remains unknown. Some may have been destroyed for use in the US weapons enrichment program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Others may have ended up in the hands of less respectable actors: Documents at the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland, describe risky efforts by profiteers to make a quick buck from cubes sold on the black market.
Koeth and Hiebert have set up an email account—uraniumcubes@gmail.com—for tips regarding the whereabouts of any of these historical artifacts. If you happen to have useful information, please alert them—and us. We’d love to hear about it.
Meanwhile, Physics Today made some calls and tracked down several cubes. Here’s where we found them:
Atomkeller museum, Haigerloch, Germany
The entrance to the laboratory of Werner Heisenberg’s reactor experiment (left) was underneath a medieval church and castle in Haigerloch, Germany. Today the site is home to the Atomkeller Museum (right), which showcases artifacts from the failed experimental effort. Credits: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Goudsmit Collection (left); LepoRello (Wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0 (right)Where it’s stored: The cube (which is not fully intact) is on display behind Plexiglas 15 millimeters thick at the nuclear physics museum. The site is located beneath a church in what was once an underground laboratory where German physicists built an experimental reactor. The device consisted of hundreds of uranium cubes strung together by airplane cable and suspended in a pit of heavy water to regulate the rate of fission. A replica of the uranium chandelier reactor is also on display. How it got there: The cube likely came from a Haigerloch colleague of Heisenberg’s, says Egidius Fechter, the museum’s curator. Eventually the cube was passed to Germany’s Landesanstalt für Umweltschutz (State Institute for Environmental Protection), whose president presented the cube to the museum in 2000. (See also the letter by Fechter and Michael Thorwart, Physics Today, April 2001, page 93.)
Mineralogical Museum, University of Bonn, Germany
Where it’s stored: The cube is on display at the two-century-old museum, which is housed inside the Baroque Poppelsdorf Palace. How it got there: The museum received the cube in 1954 from the Scientific Research Division of the Military Security Board, which was created by the UK, US, and France to oversee demilitarization in West Germany. The cube is likely one of the 659 recovered by the Alsos team from Haigerloch.
Federal Office for Radiation Protection, Germany
Where it’s stored: At the organization’s Berlin site storage facility. How it got there: The cube is probably not from Haigerloch but rather from Gottow or Stadtilm, where teams led by Diebner also had been pursuing reactor experiments. According to a 2013 article in the German Münchner Merkur newspaper, some boys in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen stole a bunch of cubes in April 1945 from a military truck that was retreating from the advancing Allied forces. The children didn’t find the black blocks very interesting—until discovering that when thrown the cubes would spark upon impact. The boys tossed dozens of the cubes into the Loisach River. Some years later another group of kids found a small black cube on the bank of the Loisach, says Klaus Mayer, deputy head of the nuclear safeguards and forensics unit of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. They too discovered that their toy produced sparks. A concerned parent showed the cube to a doctor, who discovered the block was radioactive. Eventually a private collector took possession of the cube and, in the mid 1990s, passed it on to the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. Mayer entered the story more recently, when he and his colleagues performed a nuclear forensic investigation of both that cube and the one at the Atomkeller museum. Measurements confirmed the cubes were likely made between 1940 and 1943, with the Atomkeller’s mined from material in what was then Czechoslovakia. The analysis found no indication of significant neutron bombardment, which supports the historical evidence that the Germans’ reactor failed to achieve criticality.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington
Nuclear forensics scientist Jon Schwantes holds up the uranium cube that’s stored at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Credit: Andrea Starr/PNNLWhere it’s stored: Since 2012, the cube has been used in a two-week nuclear nonproliferation training course offered to immigration and border security students from 40 member states of the International Atomic Energy Agency. “It’s a prop used . . . to exemplify what materials might look like in a developing nuclear program,” says Jon Schwantes, a senior nuclear forensics scientist at PNNL. How it got there: Richard Libby, a former scientist for PNNL who now works at the US State Department, suspects the cube originally came to Department of Energy headquarters in Washington, DC, from the Alsos mission. In the mid 1990s DOE shipped the cube and other materials to PNNL. “When it arrived at the lab, I heard it might be one of the cubes from the Heisenberg experiments,” Libby recalls. In 2002 PNNL scientists conducted nondestructive analyses on the cube to estimate its age, but the results were inconclusive.
National Museum of American History, Washington, DC
Where it’s stored: The Smithsonian has had a cube in its collection since 1983, though it is not exhibited. How it got there: The donor of the cube, Merril Eisenbud, was an environmental scientist who became the Atomic Energy Commission’s first health and safety officer in 1947. The AEC was gathering uranium for one of its programs, and it’s probable that many of the cubes recovered by the Alsos mission went to the AEC operations office in New York. When Eisenbud was directing the transfer of uranium materials in 1954 between two facilities, he discovered a cube in a pile of scrap and kept it for “historical interest.” When he retired in 1959, the AEC gifted him the uranium cube he saved from the garbage. In his 1983 donation letter to the Smithsonian, Eisenbud wrote, “There should be no question about the authenticity.”
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Harvard University’s uranium cube is sometimes used for demonstrations. Photo courtesy of Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture DemonstrationsWhere it’s stored: In the school’s Science Center. Owen Gingerich, professor emeritus of astronomy and history of science, once used it for demonstrations, including at a 2005 lecture at Harvard’s famed Memorial Church. He’d remove the cube from its lead-lined container and display the surge in signal of a Geiger counter. Harvard lecture demonstration technician Allen Crockett says the cube is still used occasionally as a “show-and-tell demo.” How it got there: The deputy science director of the Alsos mission, Edwin Kemble, also was Harvard’s physics department chair, and he brought a cube back to Cambridge in 1945. Gingerich says he and other faculty initially thought the cube was the only one left from the German effort. Then he showed it to von Weizsäcker. “He had a broad smile,” Gingerich says. “He said he recognized it but that there had been hundreds of them, not just one.”
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York (previously)
Where it’s stored: Unknown. Michael Kotlarchyk, head of the School of Physics and Astrophysics, says he believes the university once had a cube, which was stored in a cylindrical container lined with shielding. But in the early 1990s, due to changes in a law regarding the storage of radioactive materials, the university decided to dispose of the cube. “I guess in hindsight, we might have made the wrong decision,” Kotlarchyk says. How it got there: “Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have any information about how we obtained the cube,” Kotlarchyk says.
I
was really surprised to read this sentence in your new energy correspondent Jillian
Ambrose’s report on electricity generation going greener (“Fossil fuels produce less than half of UK electricity for first time,” 21 June; www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon-energy-overtakes-fossil-fuels-as-the-uks-largest-electricity-source) viz: "UK
homes and businesses will rely more on clean electricity generated by wind
farms, solar panels, hydro power and nuclear power reactors."
I
cannot understand how she could put renewable energy conversion technologies
alongside nuclear, and describe both as ‘clean.’
The
former, to be sure, are virtually clean (after manufacture of the conversion
technology, such as turbines or panels), but nuclear is certainly not "clean."
Aside
from routine radioactive emissions and the huge contamination of the entire
nuclear plant in operation leaving a decommissioning nightmare, there is also
the creation of nuclear waste, for which no nation has a long term management
solution, and the cataclysmic consequences of accidents, with Fukushima fallout
costing a fortune to clean up; and
Chernobyl's radiological contamination still persistent in the far
away Alpine uplands in Austria as well as in close-by Belarus and Ukraine.
Additionally,
nuclear is not ‘carbon-clean’ either, when the full nuclear fuel chain is a
examined, as I pointed out 14 years ago in The Guardian. (“There is nothing green about Blair's
nuclear dream: To assess the industry's environmental impact, we must look at
the whole fuel cycle,” 20 October 2005; www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/oct/20/greenpolitics.world)
The
nuclear industry lobby has tried to brand nuclear as part of a suite of "clean
energy technologies." It demonstrably isn’t. Please don't adopt this inaccurate and
highly misleading shorthand in The Guardian.
You report on Monday that Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has disagreed with his namesake , Jeremy Corbyn, as leader of the Official Opposition (Mail, June 17) over who was responsible for the attack on two oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, describing the latter’s scepticism and request for evidence of Iran’s guilt as “pathetic.”
I do not know who carried out the attack, but in such a sensitive unstable global region, it surely makes sense to determine with certainty the pre perpetrator before pointing the finger or taking action.
The author points out correctly that there has been considerable cynicism worldwide about American claims that the attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday were conducted by Iran. These include the German defence minister.
Iran has denied the accusation, and on Twitter, the term “Gulf of Tonkin” trended alongside the “Gulf of Oman.”
[That historical reference is telling, Higgins explained " It was in citing the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” — the North Vietnamese were accused of attacking American destroyers in that gulf in 1964 — that President Lyndon B. Johnson persuaded the Congress to authorize greater American military involvement in Vietnam. Historians have concluded that the attack never happened and Johnson’s ploy is now seen as the quintessential false flag operation."]
He argues, sensible, that “with tensions rising in the region since attacks on four tankers off the United Arab Emirates in May, understanding what happened and who is to blame is crucial.” and points out “ Thanks to the internet and the range of publicly available information, confirming or denying such an attack has become far easier since the 1960s. A distance of several thousand miles does not mean much today.
Tools and information like satellite imagery that was once only available to intelligence agencies can now be found on everyday tools such as Google Maps. Social media allows far-flung people to share information.”
Mr Higgins concludes that what the videos and photographs published by the United States don’t show us is important, pointing out that while the object on the side of the Kokuka Courageous oil tanker is described as a “likely limpet mine” the images presented aren’t clear enough to verify that.
Nothing presented as evidence proves that the object was placed there by the Iranians. The video shows only that the Iranians chose to remove it for an as yet unknown reason.
He ends asserting:” In the escalating conflict between the United States and Iran we have to work on all the information available, not just what one side presents.”
So what is now important is Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt publishes the evidence he claims to have to prove that Iran was responsible.
I was very interested to readNeringa Rekasiute’s article on the ‘nuclear oasis‘ of Ignalina’s giant nuclearcomplex in Europe Now (“In a Soviet-era nuclear town, I brought Lithuania’s forgotten side to light, “ The Guardian, 12 June 2019; www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/12/soviet-era-nuclear-town-lithuania-isolated-communities) having visited the vast site several years ago as part of a visit by the Vienna-based World Institute for Nuclear Security. (WINS).
During that visit to the site - which contains a decommissioned turbine halls so huge that severaljumbo jetaircraft could comfortably be accommodated inside - I learned of an extremely alarming security incident involving the theft of a full-sized nuclear fuel rod from the site. Although since recovered, it demonstrated how important it is to properly secure even sites of closed reactors.
Last week I attended the European Commission-sponsored Euradwaste conference in Pitesti, Romania, (http://fisa-euradwaste2019.nuclear.ro/), where a presentation on decommissioning Ignalina was made by scientists (Prof. Poskas & Dr Narkunas) from the nuclear engineering laboratory of the Lithuanian Energy Institute in Kaunas, the nation’s second city after capital Vilnius.
Their work has been on assessing and modelling the distribution of radioactive carbon-14, in the very high stack of graphite blocks around the reactor core prior to dismantling. This suggests that even though Ms Rekasiute feels the Lithuanian government “mainly pretends” the adjoining company city of Visaginas “isn’t there”, the government in Vilnius is seriously trying to find safe ways to dismantle the plant using the trained local workforce.
The experience gained will certainly prove useful to the UK, which has several reactors either already closed, or close to closure, such as the troubled Hunterson reactors near Glasgow, where hundreds of cracks have been discovered in the graphite core. (“Footage of cracks in North Ayrshire nuclear reactor released,” Guardian, 8 March 2019;https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/08/photos-cracks-north-ayrshire-hunterston-b-nuclear-reactor).
I submitted this letter to the Conservative cheerleading Daily Mail. Unsurprisingly they declined to publish it, but as today Boris Johnson launches his Conservative leadership ( and concomitantly Prime ministership) campaign, this matter needs a public airing.
I was very interested in your Comment on Tuesday (Daily Mail, 11 June 2019) call to Boris Johnson to come out of his bunker.
What reason could the lead candidate to be our next Prime Ministerhave to hide away from the media, especially as he was once a journalist himself?
One reason might be some of the nefarious activities in which Mr Johnson indulged when he was a reporter, which some might regard as far worse than taking Class A illegal drugs.
The most notorious occurred in 1990, when Mr Johnson was Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.
The tale involved Johnson’s old Eton School friend, Darius Guppy, who became worried that a News of the World reporter, Stuart Collier, was sniffing around about his past his dubious activities, and might be about to expose them.
Guppy wanted Collier to be frightened off by an attack on him, but he did not know where Collier lived
He asked Johnson to help him find it, and his phone conversation was secretly recorded by Peter Risdon, a business associate of Guppy, who distrusted him.
In the call, Guppy tells Johnson one of the London heavies who was lined up to beat up Collier was becoming impatient.
Shortly after, Johnson revealed that his anxiety that the man from the News of the World could discover that he was involved, saying:
"He is extremely dangerous, extremely dangerous. If you f--k up in any way, I mean frankly if he suspects that I am involved in this ... forget about me. Honestly, Darius, you have really got to think whether it's worth your while."
Mr Johnson blurted out he had approached 4 individuals to try to get Mr Collier's details, only two of whom he could fully trust. "If it got widely known that he'd been beaten up, it would inevitably get back to the contact I've used."
Johnson anxiously asks Guppy: "How badly are you going to hurt this guy?"
Guppy answers: "Not badly at all."
Johnson then asks "If this guy is seriously hurt, I am going to be f--king furious." Guppy: "I guarantee you he will not be seriously hurt."
Johnson worriedly asks: "How badly hurt will he be?"
Guppy responds: "He will not have a broken limb or a broken arm and he will not, er, he will not be put into intensive care or anything like that. He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a, and a cracked rib or something like that."
Mr Johnson: "A cracked rib."
Guppy: "Nothing which you didn't suffer in rugby okay but he will get scared and that is what I want him to do, I want him to get scared..."
