Nuclear Secrets Stolen from Oak Ridge

[Guest Beth Daley]

WNBC and other outlets report today that: “a contract worker is accused of stealing nuclear secrets from the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Investigators said the worker wanted to sell the secrets to a "foreign country.” The information concerned how to enrich uranium.

 

“The FBI should be congratulated for their role in thwarting this situation. However, a series of troubling security breaches show that the nuclear weapons complex simply does not take security as seriously as it should,” said Peter Stockton, POGO investigator and advisor to a former Secretary of the Department of Energy. Numerous Government Accountability Office and Department of Energy Inspector General reports have documented security failures of the nuclear weapons complex.

 

DOE should consolidate the number of nuclear weapons sites from 13 sites to 7 in order to minimize the cost of security and the potential targets. But bureaucratic stalling has kept these plans from moving forward. .