By George Lobsenz
While President Obama has said he plans to sharply boost the Energy Department’s role in corralling “loose nukes” in other countries, the department is having considerable difficulty keeping track of its own nuclear materials at home, according to a new internal review.
In a Feb. 18 audit report to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Inspector General Gregory Friedman said DoE could not accurately account for “significant quantities” of sensitive nuclear materials that it has loaned to U.S. academic institutions, radioactive waste processing facilities and other companies that hold licenses to use and store uranium, plutonium and other items that could be used in dirty bombs.
And while noting that DoE has been trying for years to resolve discrepancies in the government’s Nuclear Materials Management Safeguards System (NMMSS), the IG questioned whether DoE had been somewhat cavalier in accepting assurances from colleges and industry that “lost” nuclear material had not gotten into any wrong hands.
“During 2004, a number of domestic licensees reported that their actual holdings of department-owned nuclear materials were less than the quantities recorded in [the] NMMSS,” the audit report said. “Based on that information, the department agreed to write off over 20,000 grams of special nuclear material and over 19,400 kilograms of depleted and/or normal uranium without investigating the whereabouts or actual disposition of the material.”
Among the most disturbing incidents, the IG’s auditors tracked down a 32-gram plutonium-beryllium source at a college that was not recorded in the NMMSS. The auditors learned the source had been transferred from one college to another in 1986, but that the new storage location had never been noted or verified by DoE.
“This department-owned source had been at ‘College A’ for over 20 years without any departmental monitoring or control” until the IG’s office went out and physically verified its presence in a storage area at the unidentified college, the audit report said.
And the report said that was not the only case the IG found where the department had lost all remembrance of its own nuclear materials after they were loaned out to industry or academia.
The auditors said they found several licensees that “had custody of loaned nuclear materials but had no regular contact with department officials and were unaware of procedures to return materials they no longer needed.
“The materials these licensees wished to return to the department, which in one case has been in storage at a facility and never used for over 30 years, included quantities of enriched and depleted uranium,” the report said. “These facilities had not been contacted by the department for periodic confirmation of [nuclear material] balances or inquiries as to whether they still had a need for the materials in their custody. As such, current licensees told us that they were confused about their return options.”
The IG’s office said it had given DoE the name of those facilities so department officials could retrieve the materials.
Overall, the IG said that in checking inventories of DoE nuclear materials at 40 domestic facilities, the department was not able to accurately account for the locations or quantities of certain materials at 15 of those facilities.
The IG report noted that DoE has been trying to fix its nuclear material tracking problems since 2001, when the IG first flagged the issue of major discrepancies in the NMMSS. The IG said DoE responded by seeking to confirm all NMMSS inventory data in 2004, a one-time effort that enabled the department to improve the accuracy of the NMMSS data to some degree.
However, the IG said DoE never followed up on commitments in 2004 to conduct periodic checks on nuclear materials, leading to continuing weaknesses in the database.
The IG acknowledged that many of the department’s nuclear material tracking problems dated back many years, making them hard to fix. However, the IG said that without improvements, the fact was that DoE “may be unable to detect lost or stolen material.”
DoE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security acknowledged the shortcomings identified in the IG report and pledged to take corrective action.
The IG report comes as the Obama administration is seeking major budget increases for DoE over the next 10 years to expand the agency’s efforts to help Russia and other countries secure their weapons-usable nuclear materials. Obama says the additional money will help address one of the major security threats faced by the United States–that terrorists or hostile governments will gain access to “loose nukes” overseas.
DoE has been credited with making major nuclear material security improvements at numerous Russian facilities and has been expanding those efforts to other countries holding sensitive nuclear materials.
At the same time, though, the department continues to struggle with nuclear material accountability within its own nuclear weapons complex. The Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group, disclosed Feb. 26 that significant nuclear material accounting discrepancies had been discovered at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lab officials acknowledged the problems, but said no materials had been lost or stolen.
The department’s problems with nuclear material tracking are somewhat surprising in light of extensive efforts to improve domestic nuclear material controls by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which also utilizes the NMMSS to track radioactive materials in use at academic and commercial facilities that it licenses.
NRC recently toughened its nuclear material tracking requirements on industry in response to increased concerns that lost or stolen nuclear materials might be used to make dirty bombs.
DoE officials responding to the IG report suggested the NRC’s new requirements would help the department improve its nuclear material accounting as well.