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US nuke list posted online by mistake

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-04 08:10

WASHINGTON: The US government accidentally posted on the Internet a list of government and civilian nuclear facilities and their activities in the United States, but a US official said yesterday the posting included no information that compromised national security.

The 266-page document was published on May 6 as a transmission from President Barack Obama to the US Congress. According to the document, the list was required by law and will be provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Some of the pages are marked "highly confidential safeguards sensitive."

While there is security at the facilities, the list could presumably be useful for terrorists or anyone else who would like to harm the United States.

An Energy Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly, said none of the sites are directly part of the government's nuclear weapons infrastructure.

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 publication of the list was first reported in an online secrecy newsletter on Monday. The document was posted on the Government Printing Office Website, and has since been removed.

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.

Nuke papers at TV studio

In Canada, senior officials left a binder full of confidential nuclear documents in a television studio and made no attempt to retrieve them, the TV network involved said yesterday.

The binder was found in a CTV television studio after a visit by Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt. CTV, which kept the binder for six days before breaking the news, said the documents showed the government would spend far more money on a troubled nuclear reactor than it had acknowledged.

The aging Chalk River reactor in eastern Ontario was shut down in May and will not resume production of medical isotopes for at least three months.

The revelation is doubly embarrassing for Ottawa, given that former foreign minister Maxime Bernier was forced to resign in May 2008 after leaving secret documents in the apartment of a girlfriend who had ties to organized crime.

AP - Reuters