Gee, first we had the Los Alamos Meth Lab case, then the Sandia Stalker, and now Oak Ridge has A. Q. Oakley.
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1582/a-q-oakley-bust
NNSA should have its own episode of Cops.
Roy Lynn Oakley, a Bechtel Jacobs contract employee at Oak Ridge, attempted to sell sections of a gaseous diffusion barrier—not uranium as some mistakenly report, but the technology to enrich it—to an FBI agent posing as a French espion. I haven’t seen the indictment yet, but DOJ put out a statement:
Specifically, Count 1 of the Indictment charges that on January 26, 2007, Roy Lynn Oakley, having possession of, access to, and having been entrusted with sections of “barriers” and associated hardware used for uranium enrichment through the process of gaseous diffusion which constituted appliances within the meaning of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and which involved and incorporated Restricted Data within the meaning of Title 42, United States Code, Section 2014(y), and the said, Roy Lynn Oakley, having reason to believe that such data would be utilized to injure the United States and secure an advantage to a foreign nation, did communicate, transmit, and disclose such data to another person in violation of the Atomic Energy Act, specifically Title 42 United States Code, Section 2274(b).
The Knoxville News-Sentinel, which published the excellent courtroom drawing by R. Daniel Proctor (above), has the best coverage so far. If you read one story, read Frank Munger and Jamie Satterfield’s trash or treason story in the News-Sentinel.
Basically, Oakley—far from being A Q Khan—took a couple of broken sections home, then tried to sell them rather ineptly.
Oakley’s lawyer, the feisty Herb Moncier, is calling the diffusion barriers “trash.” “Moncier said Oakley’s job was to break up metal rods so they could be thrown away,” according to AP’s Duncan Mansfield. “Moncier did not know what the rods were made of, but said they were not uranium or dangerous.”
Tubes, Not Rods
Did not know what they were made of. Yeah. Hey Herb, maybe you should figure that out before trial. I humbly suggest grabbing a copy of the classic Uranium Enrichment and Nuclear Weapon Proliferation by Allan S. Krass, Peter Boskma, Boelie Elzen and Wim A. Smit.
Krass et al provide a very clear explanation of sintered nickel powder tubes—which sound a lot like Moncier’s “rods”—why they are so hard to produce and, implicitly, why a would-be nuclear state might want to take a look at our “trash”:
It is now easy to understand why a barrier is quite difficult to produce. The actual methods used by various countries are classified, but it is known that the United States used sintered nickel powders, while those in the new French Tricastin plant are “ceramic.”
[snip]
Whatever the material, it must be bonded under high pressure and temperature into sheets only a few microns thick. These very thin sheets must be able to withstand pressure differentials of the order of 0.3 to 0.5 kg/cm 2 for many years without failure.
[snip]
The barrier must be assembled in a way which will maximize its area of contract with the gas. In US gaseous diffusion stages this is done by manufacturing the barrier in the form of sheets of cylindrical tube bundles.
[snip]
The individual tubes which make up the barrier must be small enough to provide a large surface area for diffusion but large enough to permit easy flow of the process gas. Again, no information is available on the size of the tubes, but if it is assumed that the tubes are about 2 m long and 1 cm in diameter, then about 160,000 of them would be used in such a stage. This can be compared with some of the early US stages which contained several thousand tubes each.
The best part of all of this is that Oakley thought the French might want our obsolete gaseous diffusion technology, even though Areva is planning to decommission their own diffusion plant once George Besse II, a URENCO centrifuge plant, comes on line at Tricastin.
Still, Oakley called the French embassy in Washington to offer the broken tubes. “They laughed at him,” according to a document filed by Moncier.
Laughed at him … then presumably called the FBI.
Bad boys, bad boys …
Oakley may be a totally inept moron, but he obviously had every intention of harming the national security of the United States with his actions. He won't be needing a retirement plan, however, as he'll likely be spending the rest of his remaining years behind bars.
ReplyDeleteSounds like Bechtel does a poor job of screening the contractors who work for them. Kind of like the screening job done by LANL when they hired young Jessica Quintanna and then promptly gave her a Sigma 15 and the associated keys to the nuclear bomb kingdom.
Heckava job, NNSA. Keep up the great work at running our nuclear weapons complex!
Did this guy have a security clearance? If so, then the agency that granted the clearance has some responsibility here as they do in the case of Quintana.
ReplyDelete"L" clearance. Which are only reinvestigated every 10 years.
ReplyDeleteGood blog entry. Good links. But sounds like expensive to make but now useless junk. Probably same as the meth lab documents. Real story now is whether the propaganda generators are setting the American public up to accept an idiotic military operation against Iran to kill more American service personnel and civilians than has been possible in Iraq. The FBI buyer could have impersonated an Iranian, not a Frenchman.
ReplyDelete"Gerald Boyd, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge manager, said he was limited in what he could say because of ongoing law-enforcement matters.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Boyd said the East Tennessee Technology Park and other DOE facilities in Oak Ridge “are protected by multiple layers of security systems and detection programs — both visible and unseen, meant to identify rogue employees attempting to abuse their access and position.”
Boyd said those security systems successfully identified the suspect in this case."
Urrrrrr, okay.
Isn't this a bit like saying that the LAPD raid on JQ's druggie roommate is a great success story for NNSA's and LANL's security systems?
"Isn't this a bit like saying that the LAPD raid on JQ's druggie roommate is a great success story for NNSA's and LANL's security systems?"
ReplyDeleteYes, 12:38. EXACTLY like that.
Heck, this story was overshadowed by the Oak Ridge story. Maybe not as sensational but still interesting. Seem LANL folks are not only malcontents, bumbling fools but....Excited. Who do you know goes to D.C. on a regular basis?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.insideedition.com/ourstories/inside_stories/story.aspx?storyid=858