Reply #35: Report: Lab Not Tracking All Plutonium

[Hollow Shells]

By JENNIFER TALHELM
Associated Press
September 13, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A stockpile of plutonium and other nuclear weapons materials stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory hasn't been fully accounted for in 13 years or more, a government audit has found.

The northern New Mexico lab's workers have done regular, partial inventories of the material, which the government considers to be at high risk of theft, the audit by the Energy Department's inspector general, Gregory Friedman, found.

Yet an inventory of all the material hasn't been done in ''perhaps 13 years or more,'' Friedman wrote. It wasn't even done when the lab's management contract changed last year, investigators noted in the report made public Wednesday.

http://www.gopusa.com/news/2007/september/0913_plutonium.shtml