Whoops, Someone Posted Our Sensitive Nuclear Secrets On the Internet!

Last month, President Obama was passing a 266-page document of classified nuclear information over to Congress, to be given to the International Atomic Energy Agency.  But as he was handing it over, he tripped and dropped it and it fell into the internet.  So the document, marked “highly confidential safeguards sensitive”  (probably supposed to be a punctuation mark in there somewhere), became unconfidential and unsafeguarded very quickly!  So now it’s a roadmap for terrorists to find all our nuke dens right?  

“I regret that some people are painting it as a roadmap for terrorists because that’s not what it is,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Government’s Project on Government Secrecy.

You hear that terrorists?  If you want to know highly confidential secrets about our country’s nuclear program, DO NOT LOOK AT THIS DOCUMENT.  By this way, Aftergood was the one who found the document on a government website and brought it to public attention.  The blood is on your hands, too, Steven Aftergood!

“This is not a disclosure of sensitive nuclear technologies or of facility security procedures. It is simply a listing of the numerous nuclear research sites and the programs that are under way,” Aftergood said. “And so it poses no security threat whatsoever.”

Programs that are underway at nuclear research sites were on the list, but that is not to be confused with information about sensitive nuclear technologies.

Included in the report, however, are details on a storage facility for highly enriched uranium at the Y-12 complex at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and some sites at the Energy Department’s Hanford nuclear site in Washington state, this official acknowledged.

 

The document includes both government and civilian nuclear facilities, all of which have various levels of security, including details and location of nation’s 103 commercial nuclear power reactors, information readily available from various sources.

The document details the location of the nuclear sites and what is being done there.

“While we would have preferred it not be released, the Departments of Energy, Defense, and Commerce and the NRC all thoroughly reviewed it to ensure that no information of direct national security significance would be compromised,” LaVera said in a statement.