You wonder how come the security is so lax on a highly dangerous element. Maybe too much Duff beer at work?
Posted on 01/28/2003 2:13:20 PM PST by MadIvan
Japan on Tuesday admitted that 206kg of its plutonium - enough to make about 25 nuclear bombs - is unaccounted for.
Government scientists said that 6,890kg of plutonium had been extracted since 1977 from spent nuclear fuel at a processing plant about 120km north east of Tokyo. But that is 3 per cent short of the amount the plant was estimated to have produced.
About 5kg to 8kg of plutonium are needed to make a 20-kiloton atomic bomb similar to the one that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945.
Experts said the missing amount was surprisingly large.
There is normally a margin of error of 1 per cent or less when measuring liquid plutonium, which can dissolve into other elements.
Japan's admission comes at a time of acute sensitivity because of the threat of nuclear proliferation in north-east Asia following North Korea's revival of its mothballed nuclear programme.
However, there is no evidence that North Korea was linked to the missing plutonium even though it is known to smuggle goods in and out of Japan.
"This is an unusually large amount of plutonium to be unaccounted for, which makes me uncomfortable, although I think it's highly unlikely that it was stolen," said Tatsujiro Suzuki, senior research scientist at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry.
The science ministry, which reported the discrepancy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), dismissed the idea that the plutonium had been stolen. It said about 90kg was probably diluted into waste-water and about 30kg probably dissolved into other elements.
It admitted it was baffled by the remaining 86kg but said initial output projections may have been too high and the plutonium may not have been produced.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, said: "The Agency [is] confident that no nuclear material has been diverted from the facility."
The IAEA, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, has urged Japan to strengthen its procedures for measuring nuclear material since it first noted discrepancies in 1998.
As you know, your comments are quite accurate regarding pachinko in Japan and the North Korean connection and how it is essentially legalized gambling.
It is another in a long string of what, in Japan, is on the surface not necessarily what is below the surface in reality. Laws and their actual ENFORCEMENT are much that way over in Japan. Particularly, for example, (not even mentioning prostitution) in Japanese construction where on the surface the domestic criminal law outlaws bid rigging and cartels (so the Japan Foreign Ministry can tell the Americans they are doing everything by the book and all laws are in place), and yet under the surface there is hardly a construction project in Japan that is not rigged with the influence of Yakuza, who also work ferociously to knock out any US competitors that try the hardest and sincerest to get in the market here, to no avail. US free traders who havent worked in the field, then altruistically and naively yell that "American firms over there are crybabies" and "they don't try", when the fact of the matter is due to their blindness they (the well-meaning yet uninitiated) cannot see the surface (everything is in legal harmony) is actually quite completely a odds with what the true, deeper state of things are and what is really going on behind the scenes.
A true dichotomy of theory vs. praxis, of perceptions and realities. Pachinko, prostitution, construction are very good examples.
So will a number of things that are 10^6 times cheaper than plutonium.
The Pachinko industry in Japan is, for all intents and purposes, strongly controlled by the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in alliance with both Japanse boryokudan and Korean-ethnic (i.e. North Korean) underworld entities in Japan. I know the money route quite well.
By the way, you might also be interested to know the North Korean mafia is also quite active in the northern border area of DPRK, along the Chinese border, running all kinds of scams: black markets, smuggling, bribery to get people out into China, flesh trade brokering, etc. It's all true, believe me.
You wonder how come the security is so lax on a highly dangerous element. Maybe too much Duff beer at work?
At a specific gravity of 19.8 (19.8 times the density of water), 206 kilos occupy 10.4 liters of space. Think of 5 2-liter soda bottles
Regards, Ivan
I've never understood how a person loses this stuff?
Simple,......inventory 'management'.
It is in various 'special-for-future-use' wharehouses.
IMHO
The wonders of modern technology, eh?
Separating plutonium, uranium, and other products from spent fuel rods is a matter of basic chemistry - the different elements involve themselves in different chemical bonds and can be separated out that way, much like you'd precipitate iron out of a solution by adding the right chemicals.
The rods are left to cool for a number of months, then dissolved in acid under heavily shielded conditions. The various elements involved are then sorted out by chemical processes - I think one of them involves UF6, uranium-hexaflouride.
There is still vast amounts of potential energy in the "spent" fuel from a nuclear reactor, and the US policy of simply pitching it is like building a campfire with a big thick log, and disposing of the log when the outside bark is charred.
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