Story here

It must have been six years since I've seen the inside of it, but I seem to recall that there was pretty much zero security in UMR's reactor. I bet the school would love to foot the bill to change that...

"...guided tours that provided easy access to control rooms and reactor pools that hold radioactive fuel."
In March of 2001 when I was in Rolla for PRO they were letting anyone and everyone tour the reactor. Given that it was pretty cool I agree that there was minimal security. On the security side of things I remember a few years ago where UMR was developing some kind of biometric security system (face recognition maybe?). Can anyone confirm this?

All the doors are locked and have the biometric security locks, except the door to the outside, it has a key. They don't have security and they do offer tours though.

Thumb scan to get to the control room, and they have face recognition that would take you to the pool if the other door was locked. The only thing you could do with the fuel is make some sort of dirty bomb, being as it isn't highly enriched.

"An ABC News producer went unchallenged as he drove down the road in a large rental truck and stopped within 50 feet of MIT's reactor. (ABC News)"

Didn't someone say the actual reactor was underground? So a truck bomb wouldn't really do anything to it...

If it is like UMR's, it would probably just blow the building off of the top. But I think theirs actually makes electricity (not sure) so it would be different.

I don't think an attack really has to do actual damage to be effective. Just the headline "Nuclear Reactor Destroyed by Bomb" is probably enough to create widespread panic, regardless of the actual harm caused.

It's all scare tactics. Guided tours are no biggie, they make you leave everything outside and are not going to let someone in with a big overcoat and suspisious looks. The security doors are well taken care of (the face profiler was just removed though) with fingerprint scan for the outter door. Other campuses may violate tech specs by having security guards asleep, but we don't need any guards to operate our reactor. Really there isn't much they could do - theres a LONG write up for different types of accidents, and there really wouldnt be much point to stealing the low enriched fuel we have.

The funny thing is, that the security at reactors is REALLY good. Go to a tour of the Calloway plant - man, gun slits everywhere and ALOT of security in a ton of different ways. But go to chemical plants and you have alot less. Look at alot of small stories you hear all over the place of a chem plant disaster and a couple people dieing - but since its big business nothing is really being done.

Really, if they want plutonium enriched for bombs already, they can just waltz over to Russia and pay just a tiny bit for the tons they've lost. I think its such a joke that we have to guard things really tight and pretend that terrorists will come here when they can get it cheaper and far easier in the former soviet union.

I don't know. I just spent a year at a DOE site with two operational reactors operating with weapons grade uranium and I'd feel pretty confident that if I were a terrorist that I could do some major harm. Perhaps it was just where I was and everywhere else is different, but if there was to be an incident at that site it would be ugly.

What was the % enrichment?

It was somewhere in the 90s. I forget which end. It's amazing the number of things I've forgotten in the last six months...

ABC has been on rampage this week airing scaremongering news stories about anything to deal with "nuclear". They have been sitting on this for over a month, as the news stories this week were originally going to air in early September. Now that the disaster coverage, Iraq War, Bush bashing, what have you, are no longer bringing in the ratings, I guess they decided to run with it.

For this one, ABC goes around and sends a group of journalism majors who wouldn't know the difference between a control rod and a fuel element to '"investigate" security lapses at university reasearch reactors. This is going to be "fair and balanced" like Fox News (HA) right? Wrong. It is widely believed that ABC already had their minds made up about the kind of stories they were going to run with before hand. (DUH!)

For example, one thing this report didn't tell you about was the "gardener" incident. These students along with ABC were about to scream bloody murder after being granted access to a reactor facility by whom they were going to claim was a mere "gardener". Never mind the fact that the gardener was actually the former director of the facility and a licensed SRO. A quick tongue lashing by the PR department of the university in mention quickly quelled that. I would have just let them spout of their BS just to make them look more like the fools they are later on.



I give up. I'll just quietly do my job. As if it wasn't bad enough that I was subjected to a big stinking load of shit a few weeks ago as I listened to a seminar guest spout off about the evils of the "military industrial complex" and space nuclear power who hadn't the slightest hint of science and technical know how or education but was rather a self proclaimed "professional activist". Now there is this to contend with. I wish I could go on forever, but its not worth it.


Time for a cold beer and a good 8 hours of sleep. If anyone down there in Rolla hears any cussing around 9:00PM tomorrow night, thats just me screaming my head off at the TV up here in Columbia.



Good thing we have organizations like the Nuclear Energy Institute to go to bat for us. I was very impressed by the visit I was able to have with Felix Killar on Tuesday.

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/
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A while ago I saw an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. "Mizzou reactor has weapons grade uranium." They were even nice enough to include a nice picture of the building and roughly describe the location. Not that Mizzou's reactor is hard to find but it seems a little odd to advertise its location to millions of readers when the whole point of the journalist is to prevent terrorism. That is their point, right?

No, their point is to write the article then when down the line something happens to the reactor (which they are hoping for) they can bring up that they gave warning signs and can get another 5 minutes of fame.

I was sort of implying that. Journalists would be out of business if it wasn't for bad news.