by CKR
The announcement of the new contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory has been delayed, apparently because the local DOE area office is understaffed and not ready to manage a new contractor (story in the Santa Fe New Mexican, subscription only).
So in the meantime, let's have some fun.
Today's fun is the news that 661 pounds of plutonium seem to be missing from the Lab. I've got an appointment with an airplane later today, so I don't have time to figure out if the original report is on the web.
My earlier response to a similar report about Sellafield is here.
The calculation for Los Alamos is for the last half-century. That's 12 pounds per year, or less than half the number for Sellafield.
But it's more likely to turn out to be accounting errors than
-- It was discarded in unsafe amounts in landfills at the Los Alamos lab...-- It was shipped to an Energy Department burial site in a New Mexico salt mine, without accurate records of such shipments being kept.
-- It was stolen or otherwise shipped off site for unknown reasons.
In order to do any of these things, it would have had to pass multiple radiation screening points.
Los Alamos doesn't handle as much plutonium as Sellafield; it's a research place, not a production plant. Accounting was more poorly done in the early days, but even so, the discrepancy is small. I'd have to look at the report to say anything about its methods, but it looks like this is right down there with the concerns about Sellafield.
Sure does make exciting headlines, though.