Remember when the Bush regime hit the airways with dire warnings about how they weren't going to wait until Saddam's smoking gun turned out to be a mushroom cloud over the US?
It turns out the US might have just had that mushroom cloud after all but federal authorities all but concealed it from the American public. The main player was an outfit called Nuclear Fuel Services of Erwin, Tennessee. NFS, a private company, has a contract to transform weapons grade uranium into a weaker product suitable for use in civilian reactors.
As the New York Times reports, last year NFS had a wee problem:
"...the event at the Nuclear Fuel Service factory was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid dribbling under a door and into a hallway. Workers had previously described a yellow liquid in a “glove box,” a sealed container with gloves built into the sides to allow a technician to manipulate objects inside, but managers had decided that it was ordinary uranium.
"In fact, it was highly enriched uranium that had been declared surplus from the weapons inventory of the Energy Department.
"In a puddle, the uranium is not particularly hazardous, but if it formed a more spherical shape, according to the commission, it could become a “critical mass,” a quantity of nuclear fuel sufficient to sustain a chain reaction, in this case outside a reactor. According to the letter sent by the lawmakers, the puddle, containing about nine gallons, reached to within four feet of an elevator pit. The letter from the congressmen says the agency’s report suggests “that it was merely a matter of luck that a criticality accident did not occur.'”
Like so many things in the states these days, it wasn't the slip up but the cover-up that's outrageous. The spill was so bad that it kept the NFS plant closed for seven months last year but residents of the area weren't told why.
After the incident the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency altered the NFS licence and ordered that the public have 20-days to request a hearing on the licence changes.
"But no member of the public ever did. In fact, no member of the public could find out about the changes. The document describing them, including the notice of hearing rights for anyone who felt adversely affected, was stamped “official use only,” meaning that it was not publicly accessible. “Official use only” is a category below “Secret” and, while documents in that category are not technically classified, they are kept from the public."
The incident was even concealed from Congress until one of the five NRA commissioners found a way to leak a reference to it in a memo.
Does this sound like a Simpsons episode?
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