Deepwater Horizon Inspections: MMS Skipped Monthly Inspections On Doomed Rig

Frontline: The Carter Administration took the United States off the plutonium recycle path in the 1970s based on irrational "concerns that plutonium would end up in the wrong hands."



Response: Plutonium proliferation and terrorism risks cannot be dismissed so quickly. Less than 15 pounds of plutonium-- -about the size of an orange---is enough to build a nuclear bomb that could destroy a city. A group of former U.S. nuclear weapons designers, in a study for the Nuclear Control Institute, concluded that terrorists would be capable of building such a bomb using reactor-grade plutonium of the sort separated out by commercial reprocessing plants. Further, it is technically impossible to safeguard plutonium bulk-handling facilities, such as spent-fuel reprocessing and MOX fuel-fabrication plants, that process plutonium by the ton. Unavoidable measurement uncertainty means that knowledgeable insiders could beat the accounting system and remove significant quantities from the plants, perhaps via the unsafeguarded low-level waste stream. [For detailed analysis of these proliferation risks, see studies by Paul Leventhal and Marvin Miller, and the plutonium section on our "What's New" page.]
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