IDAHO FALLS, Idaho – In 2017, security experts from the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory had a small amount of nuclear material stolen from their rental car while retrieving it in Texas.

The plutonium and cesium, materials used to make a nuclear bomb, were taken while the two specialists slept in a San Antonio hotel. The material hasn't been found.

The Department of Energy says it was a negligible amount – much less radioactive than a smoke detector, in fact.

But Patrick Malone, who first covered the story for the Center for Public Integrity, says this isn't an isolated incident.

"The more important fact here that we were trying to get at is how little accountability there is when the government loses nuclear materials relative to civilian materials that are lost, which are regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as opposed to the Department of Energy," Malone states.

An Energy Department representative says Idaho laboratory personnel reported the San Antonio incident immediately to the agency. It adds that local law enforcement is looking for the material, which is about the size of a dime, and that the public was never at risk.

However, Malone says the government rarely discloses incidents where it loses nuclear material and that there's no firm number for how much nuclear material is unaccounted for.

The closest estimate Malone says he can find is a 2009 report from the Energy Department's Inspector General.

"In that report, they identified at least five nuclear-warheads' worth of highly enriched uranium and plutonium alone that on paper was listed as safely stored and protected by the Department of Energy that could not be found,” he relates. “I mean, it's missing."

Malone says the material tends to go missing in small amounts, getting caught in national laboratories' ductwork, classified as waste and disposed of without being inventoried or diverted in some unclear way.

Malone notes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission closely regulates civilian stocks and recently fined Idaho State University $8,500 for losing an amount of plutonium comparable to that lost in San Antonio.

However, Malone says in the U.S. government's case, the Energy Department awarded the contractor that lost the material in San Antonio 97 percent of available bonuses at the end of 2017.

"As far as the Department of Energy is concerned, there was no enforcement action, there was no fine against this contractor, and they basically handed this contractor almost every single dime that they possibly could have gotten for their performance in 2017," Malone states.


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Federal officials are in Idaho to discuss where to store nuclear waste. The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency, is holding two meetings in Idaho Falls. The first is today and will feature a workshop on the siting of radioactive waste facilities. Wednesday's board meeting will focus on the Energy Department's consent-based siting process for waste.

Don Hancock, the nuclear waste program director for the Southwest Research and Information Center, said the consent-based process fell by the wayside during the Trump administration but has become a focus again under President Biden.

"They're starting off saying we think we want to come up with a consent-based process to see if we can store spent fuel for some considerable period of time," he explained. "But people would be consenting to temporary storage as opposed to permanent disposal."

Hancock added the Obama administration decided the siting process should prioritize temporary sites rather than long-term geological storage and the Biden administration has picked up there. The public can be involved in both Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board's meetings this week, either in person or online.

Hancock noted that Boise State University was selected by the Energy Department to receive $2 million dollars to study consent-based siting. However, he added it is not clear what that means for Idaho.

"An important question that I think people of Idaho would want to know is does Boise State and their partners think that what they're doing now and what they could be doing down the line is having Idaho consent to being this kind of interim storage site?," he said.

Boise State University did not respond to a request for comment by the deadline for this story.


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This summer's "Oppenheimer" movie will shine a light on development of the first nuclear weapons, but for many in southern New Mexico it is another reminder of the federal government's failure to recognize negative health effects their families have endured for generations.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist and director of New Mexico's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, led the research and development of the first nuclear weapons tested in the southern part of the state.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, said residents were unknowingly exposed to radiation from fallout, resulting in illness, emotional and financial distress, and death.

"The Manhattan Project and the Trinity bomb changed New Mexico forever," Cordova pointed out. "Instantaneously we became basically a sacrifice zone, and the people of New Mexico have never been part of the narrative."

Cordova participated in a weekend panel discussion following a sold-out showing of the film in Santa Fe, along with Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Cordova noted she has lost count of the number of relatives in New Mexico who have died from cancer, many within 10 years of the nuclear bomb testing.

"In my own family, I'm the fourth generation to have cancer since 1945," Cordova explained. "And now I have a 23-year-old niece who's the fifth generation, and my family's not unique. It's the story we hear all across the southern part of New Mexico, where people lived as close as 12 miles to the test site."

Cordova has spent the past 18 years trying to get areas of New Mexico included in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides money to people who were harmed, either from uranium mining or the atomic tests. The Act currently only offers compensation to "downwinders" who live in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

"There was an admission of guilt on the part of the government when they established the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act but it didn't go far enough," Cordova contended. "Including New Mexico, there's a lot of the American West that received regular fallout from those tests."


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Concerns are growing in the west about nuclear waste transportation.

On Tuesday, the Snake River Alliance is holding a webinar on these concerns, heightened by the potential of a temporary waste facility opening in New Mexico.

Kevin Kamps is the radioactive waste specialist for Beyond Nuclear. He said these fears are combined with the recent train derailment of toxic waste in Ohio.

He said the federal government and nuclear power industry are rushing to create the New Mexico temporary waste facility.

"These dumps that are proposed are called consolidated interim storage facilities, which means it's only temporary and the waste will have to move again," said Kamps. "So it's really wrongheaded. It's going to automatically double transportation risks."

In May, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a license for the temporary waste site in New Mexico.

The Biden administration says nuclear power is a key component for the country's clean energy future. However, state officials in New Mexico have voiced their opposition to the facility.

Nuclear waste also is a concern in Idaho. Experiments are starting on new nuclear reactor designs such as small modular reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory.

However, Kamps pointed out that recent research found these SMRs generate two to 30 times the amount of radioactive waste as traditional nuclear reactors.

"So another downside of all this SMR talk," said Kamps, "which unfortunately Idaho is on the cutting edge of."

Kamps said he believes the country is living on borrowed time when it comes to the potential for disaster from nuclear power.

"We really should be transitioning into a renewable energy economy in this country," said Kamps, "which is much safer, much more secure and actually much more cost effective than nuclear power."




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