By CKR
The annual ruckus is on about the plutonium mass balance at Sellafield, Britain's nuclear reprocessing center. The Times has one of the better articles that explains the issues involved.
The plutonium is tracked through processing by the radiation it emits, from which the amount of plutonium can be calculated. But the radiation is attenuated by what it has to pass through--lumps of material and solutions are harder to measure than thin layers and pure material. So errors occur and accumulate. This year's error is 30 kilograms, higher than usual. Because the size of the error will vary statistically, one higher error is not surprising.
The media love to say that 30 kilograms is enough for your unfriendly local terrorist to manufacture seven or eight or ten bombs, and you just don't ever know where that 30 kilograms is, do you? Sells papers. And they can do it every year, when the yearly inventory figures are published.
That 30 kilograms is a small amount of the total processed. Now maybe that's something to think about.