Maybe We Need A Lost and Found For Nukes

As asset tracking use cases go, they don’t get much scarier than this:

Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there.

Their task, according to documents and interviews, was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others.

To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to calibrate them: specifically, a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could potentially be used in a so-called “dirty” radioactive bomb.

But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Highway 410, in a high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed and the special valises holding these sensors and nuclear materials had vanished.

Now I don’t know what mechanisms might have been in place for tracking these materials, but we can more or less assume there was no LPWAN involved:

More than a year later, state and federal officials don’t know where the plutonium — one of the most valuable and dangerous substances on earth — is. Nor has the cesium been recovered.

No public announcement of the March 21 incident has been made by either the San Antonio police or by the FBI, which the police consulted by telephone. When asked, officials at the lab and in San Antonio declined to say exactly how much plutonium and cesium were missing. But Idaho lab spokeswoman Sarah Neumann said the plutonium in particular wasn’t enough to be fashioned into a nuclear bomb.

Not enough plutonium to make a bomb, but … no word on how much cesium was there and … it’s radioactive and bad for your health:

If you were to breathe, eat, drink, touch, or come close to large amounts of radioactive cesium, cells in your body could become damaged from the radiation that might penetrate your entire body, much like x-rays, even if you did not touch the radioactive cesium. You would probably experience similar effects if you were exposed to any other substance with similar radioactivity. You might also experience acute radiation syndrome, which includes such effects as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding, coma, and even death. A number of people in Brazil, who handled radioactive cesium that was scavenged from a medical machine used for radiation therapy, became sick from exposure to the radiation; a few of them died.

But back to the Department of Energy’s asset tracking capabilities:

It is nonetheless now part of a much larger amount of plutonium that over the years has gone quietly missing from stockpiles owned by the U.S. military, often without any public notice.

Unlike civilian stocks, which are closely monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and openly regulated — with reports of thefts or disappearances sent to an international agency in Vienna — the handling of military stocks tended by the Department of Energy is much less transparent.

I know that lost nuclear materials are a serious concern at DoE — the team at Argonne Labs has worked on this using Savi active RFID technology almost a decade ago. (There may be more recent activity than this — please feel free to comment). Here’s the DoE’s response to today’s story:

The Energy Department, which declined comment for this story, doesn’t talk about instances of lost and stolen nuclear material produced for the military. It also has been less willing than the commission to punish its contractors when they lose track of such material, several incidents suggest.

That nontransparent approach doesn’t match the government’s rhetoric.

Protecting bomb-usable materials, like the plutonium that went missing in San Antonio, “is an overriding national priority,” President Obama’s press office said in a fact sheet distributed during the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit that he hosted in late March 2016, a Washington event attended by more than 50 heads of state.

In addition to losing nuclear materials while in transit, there is the challenge of keeping tabs on inventory stored in “warehouse” facilities like Savannah River where cylinders of nuclear materials can be misplaced without actually leaving the facility.

Perhaps DoE is already at work with better rules and technologies for how their mobile workers safeguard nuclear materials during transit, but especially for “small nukes” like the ones described above, a lightweight, low power, LPWAN solution would have been inexpensive and probably helped recover something that in the wrong hands could be used as a WMD.