Ok, if you can't be trusted with the nations nuclear secrets and materials, maybe you should all be fired and replaced with competent people? Maybe you should revamp your security? Maybe you should turn it all over to people who actually TAKE THIS STUFF SERIOUSLY!
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.
Friedman said he is concerned because the lack of complete inventories means that lab workers likely haven't physically accounted for all of the material in more than a decade.
Granted the chances of inventory actually being missing is pretty low, but if they don't understand how crucial the material and documents are, then maybe a good firing is in order? At my job, if network security is breached, I'm the one responsible for it. Well if it happens enough times, guess what happens? I'm looking for another job.
And that's with relatively minor confidential information. This is stuff that in the wrong hands, can kill thousands of people.
That's something I don't want on my conscience, so I would take security of that as serious as you could get.
In an area that stores less sensitive nuclear material — containing smaller amounts of plutonium and uranium — a new shipment of nuclear material wasn't documented for eight days. Auditors noted that it was supposed to have been entered into the system within four hours.
"Under the circumstances, the nuclear material could have been diverted without any record showing that it had ever existed," Friedman wrote.
That's how serious this type of thing is.
Some lab employees don't follow instructions for how to develop identification numbers for the materials so they are easily identified. For example, auditors said one system was based on characters in a movie that a technician had just seen.
Well if he's not following the rules, fire him, demote him, reprimand him. Make sure it doesn't happen again. Am I the only one who sees this as a major problem??
Travis
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