Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

148Disasters Waiting to Happenwas hijacked, allegedly to Israel, 53 breaching EURATOM safeguards, but thegovernments concerned kept it a secret for nearly ten years. In 1974, a uraniumsmugglingoperation in India to China or Pakistan via Nepal was exposed. 54There have been numerous natural-uranium-related crimes, some involvingthefts of ton quantities. 55 In 1979, an employee at the General Electric FuelProcessing Plant in Wilmington, North Carolina stole two sixty-six pound drumsof low-enriched uranium, apparently by loading them into the trunk of his car,and used them to try to extort a hundred thousand dollars from the managementon pain of public embarrassment. 56 Over a period of several years, twenty truckloadsof radioactively contaminated tools and scrap metal were illicitly dug upand sold from a waste dump in Beatty, Nevada. 57 “Vast quantities of cannabisresin were smuggled in to Britain in radioactive waste drums destined for theAtomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell,”then recovered by asking tohave them back for the Pakistani Customs. 58 There is widespread official suspicionthat at least a dozen bombs’ worth of highly enriched uranium (HEU) wasstolen by insiders from a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania during the mid-1960s: 59“a knowledgeable insider would quite easily have made off with it. 60 At theErwin, Tennessee HEU plant, where employees checked each other for theftunder the honor system, 61 suspicious shortages of HEU have persisted for manyyears, 62 leading the Office of Nuclear Materials and Safeguards at the NuclearRegulatory Commission to recommend that the plant’s license be revoked. 63Minor amounts of bomb materials–not enough to make a bomb, but enough formaterials research or validating a threat–have been stolen from plants in NorthAmerica on at least three acknowledged occasions, not counting mere inventorydiscrepancies. 64 In one instance, a six-ounce HEU fresh fuel rod was stolen fromChalk River in Canada.Miscellaneous human and institutional flaws A senior general and the formerhead of the Italian Secret Service were arrested following an announcementby the Italian government, in October 1974,that they had discovered a plot by right-wing terrorists to poison Italy’s aqueductswith radioactive waste material stolen from a nuclear research center in NorthernItaly. The alleged threat was associated with revelations of a planned assassinationand political coup by right-wing elements. An engineer at the research center wasnamed as a conspirator, but the allegations were never substantiated. The casebecame entangled in legal technicalities. Whether the alleged plot, which gainedwidespread publicity in Italy, was real or not has never been determined. 65An analytic laboratory used by the Japanese nuclear industry to monitor effluentswas shut down by the government for falsifying and fabricating its testresults. 66 In April 1981, a forty-day cover-up of improper effluent discharges