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What Happened to the missing Plutonium?
This clarifies yesterday's story. Keeping track of the plutonium as it passes through the reprocessing system is challenging, because the spent fuel is so radioactive that its plutonium content cannot be measured directly. "You have to rely on the reactor operators' estimates," says Barnaby. As a result, he says, "some accounting error is inevitable". The nuclear industry agrees, and says that this error is typically around 1%; independent experts have argued that it is more like 3-5%. The 'missing' 30 kilograms of plutonium falls comfortably within this error margin, given that Barnaby estimates that Sellafield reprocesses around 30 tonnes of the radioactive element each year. But Keith Barnham, a physicist at Imperial College in London who has studied the UK nuclear industry's auditing, says that "it's a lot compared with previous years". Posted by: phil_b 2005-02-20 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=56899 |