Government contractors left plutonium and radioactive cesium in the back seat of a car overnight — only to return the next morning to find someone had swiped the nuclear bomb-making materials, according to a new report. A year later, the feds still have no idea where the deadly loot is, the San Antonio Express-News reports. The embarrassing theft happened while two guards working for the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory were on their way to San Antonio, Texas, to pick up nuclear material from a lab there, according to the newspaper. They’d brought small samples of the plutonium and cesium with them to help calibrate radiation detectors needed for the job — but left all of the materials in their rented Ford Expedition while they stopped for the night at a Marriott hotel in a dangerous neighborhood. The next morning, they found the car’s window smashed in and all their equipment gone, the Express-News reports. It only takes 7 pounds of plutonium — a highly valuable and carcinogenic material — to produce a working nuclear warhead, but a lab spokeswoman told the paper that the amount stolen wasn’t enough to make a weapon. In a report to the Energy Department, the Idaho lab claimed the Marriott parking lot was a secure location, because it had walls on two sides and security guards. But the San Antonio Police Department had recorded 87 thefts at the hotel and its parking lot in 2016 and 2017, according to the paper. The cops closed their investigation after finding no useful surveillance footage, fingerprints or witnesses, but were shocked at the lazy handling of such sensitive materials, spokesman Carlos Ortiz told the paper The paper says the case exemplifies the lack of transparency in how the government handles its nuclear materials, compared with civilian institutions, which face far stricter oversight and penalties. The lab wouldn’t say if the workers responsible for the bungle were punished, but the Energy Department gave the contractor, Battelle Energy Alliance LLC, an “A” grade at the end of the year and extended its contract, while one of the people responsible for safeguarding the stolen equipment won an award, the Express-News reports.<doc-sep>Thieves stole an unknown amount of plutonium and radioactive monitoring equipment from the backseat of an SUV parked overnight at a Marriott hotel in San Antonio, Texas, last year. No one knows where it is and the government is not talking. In March 2017, two lab security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory were tasked with transporting plutonium from a non-profit research lab in San Antonio, Texas, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity. Before returning to Idaho the pair stopped at a Marriott Hotel off of Interstate 410 and left the radioactive material in the backseat of a rented Ford Expedition in a “high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes,” the Center for Public Integrity report said. When they returned the next morning the rear car windows had been smashed and unknown amounts cesium and plutonium, materials that could potentially be used to fuel the creation of nuclear weapons, were gone. More than a year later, the plutonium and cesium have not been recovered and police have no idea where the materials went. A San Antonio police spokesperson says the amount of plutonium stolen was a “very small amount that wouldn’t pose any threat to any one person, it was plutonium used to calibrate an instrument.” According to the U.S Department of Energy, the amount of weapons-grade plutonium needed to build a bomb is only 7 pounds. Radioactive samples go missing more often than some might think. A 2009 Department of Energy report found that at least 1 pound of plutonium and 45 pounds of highly-enriched uranium had gone missing while it was on loan from U.S. military stockpiles. In the last 20 years, there have been 270 instances of people trafficking or “maliciously” using nuclear material, according to a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Gina Martinez at gina.martinez@time.com.<doc-sep>Two security experts from the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear materials from a nonprofit research lab there. Their task, according to documents and interviews, was to ensure that the radioactive materials did not fall into the wrong hands on the way back to Idaho, where the government maintains a stockpile of nuclear explosive materials for the military and others. To ensure they got the right items, the specialists from Idaho brought radiation detectors and small samples of dangerous materials to calibrate them: specifically, a plastic-covered disk of plutonium, a material that can be used to fuel nuclear weapons, and another of cesium, a highly radioactive isotope that could potentially be used in a so-called "dirty" radioactive bomb. But when they stopped at a Marriott hotel just off Highway 410, in a high-crime neighborhood filled with temp agencies and ranch homes, they left those sensors on the back seat of their rented Ford Expedition. When they awoke the next morning, the window had been smashed and the special valises holding these sensors and nuclear materials had vanished. Related: Despite mysterious cockpit problems and 'unexplained physiological episodes,' Air Force flights continue, according to an Express-News report More than a year later, state and federal officials don't know where the plutonium – one of the most valuable and dangerous substances on earth – is. Nor has the cesium been recovered. No public announcement of the March 21 incident has been made by either the San Antonio police or by the FBI, which the police consulted by telephone. When asked, officials at the lab and in San Antonio declined to say exactly how much plutonium and cesium were missing. But Idaho lab spokeswoman Sarah Neumann said the plutonium in particular wasn't enough to be fashioned into a nuclear bomb. It is nonetheless now part of a much larger amount of plutonium that over the years has gone quietly missing from stockpiles owned by the U.S. military, often without any public notice. Unlike civilian stocks, which are closely monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and openly regulated – with reports of thefts or disappearances sent to an international agency in Vienna — the handling of military stocks tended by the Department of Energy is much less transparent. The Energy Department, which declined comment for this story, doesn't talk about instances of lost and stolen nuclear material produced for the military. It also has been less willing than the commission to punish its contractors when they lose track of such material, several incidents suggest. That nontransparent approach doesn't match the government's rhetoric. Protecting bomb-usable materials, like the plutonium that went missing in San Antonio, "is an overriding national priority," President Obama's press office said in a fact sheet distributed during the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit that he hosted in late March 2016, a Washington event attended by more than 50 heads of state. Nuclear Threat Initiative The administration also touted the strength of its tracking of such materials, which it said would "ensure timely detection and investigation of anomalies, and deter insider theft/diversion." It further boasted about its transparency, explaining that it "has published studies and reviews of nuclear security incidents, including lessons learned and corrective actions taken." Adrift: The government didn't heed warnings about the dangers of hot air balloons, an Express-News investigation reveals. Tragedy followed. President Donald Trump, speaking to a military audience at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, on Aug. 21, 2017, parroted the Obama administration's refrain that "we must prevent nuclear weapons and materials from coming into the hands of terrorists and being used against us, or anywhere in the world for that matter." The Trump administration's Nuclear Posture Review, released in February, similarly emphasized the threat posed by nuclear terrorism, and asserted that "preventing the illicit acquisition of a nuclear weapon, nuclear materials, or related technology and expertise by a violent extremist organization is a significant U.S. national security priority." But America's record of safeguarding such materials isn't sterling. Gaps between the amount of plutonium that nuclear weapons companies have produced and the amount that the government can actually locate occur frequently enough for officials to have created an acronym for it – MUF, meaning "material unaccounted for." Just a cat or a brick The gaps have shown up at multiple nodes in the production and deployment cycle for nuclear arms: at factories where plutonium and highly-enriched uranium have been made, at storage sites where the materials are held in reserve, at research centers where the materials are loaned for study, at waste sites where they are disposed, and during transit between many of these facilities. Production of the bomb materials was so frantic during the Cold War that a total of roughly six tons of the material – enough to fuel hundreds of nuclear explosives – has been declared as MUF by the government, with most of it presumed to have been trapped in factory pipes, filters, and machines, or improperly logged in paperwork. (That figure, which dates from 2012, has not been publicly updated.) Regarding transfers to academic researchers, government agencies, or commercial firms within the United States, the Energy Department's inspector general concluded in 2009 –the most recent public accounting – that at least a pound of plutonium and 45 pounds of highly-enriched uranium loaned from military stocks had been officially listed until 2004 as securely stored, when in fact it was missing. As little as nine pounds of highly-enriched uranium (the weight of an average cat) or 7 pounds of plutonium (the weight of a brick) can produce a functioning nuclear warhead, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. So the missing amount in this category alone — the MUF stemming from loans to researchers from military stocks -- is still enough to produce at least five nuclear bombs comparable to those that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, experts say. Plutonium in any quantity is also highly carcinogenic. "Considering the potential health risks associated with these materials and the potential for misuse should they fall into the wrong hands, the quantities written off were significant," the inspector general's report stated. It also said the Energy Department still "may be unable to detect lost or stolen material." No independent probe of the department's capabilities has been conducted since then. When asked repeatedly whether the GAO conclusions were still valid, a spokesman for the department did not respond. The details of how or why U.S. nuclear materials go missing from military stocks – or the quantity of such materials involved in individual incidents -- are not disclosed by the government. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission annually publishes a tally of lost, missing or stolen radioactive material from civilian nuclear stocks (those typically used for oil and gas exploration, medical purposes, academic research and nuclear power). In a Jan. 2018 report, for example, the NRC stated during the previous year, eight such items had gone missing and two had not been recovered. None were of the type or quantity useable in a nuclear weapon. Whenever additional material goes missing, the NRC discloses it publicly. Sloppiness in transit Ensuring appropriate protections are in place for military-related nuclear materials has ironically proven a lot harder than implementing tight security for civilian nuclear materials, said Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, who participated in the NTI study. "Politically and diplomatically, it's a lot more difficult," Pomper said. "We're not having significant conversations on this issue." In the San Antonio incident, the San Antonio police were dumbfounded that the experts from Idaho did not take more precautions. They "should have never left a sensitive instrument like this unattended in a vehicle," said Carlos Ortiz, spokesman for the San Antonio Police Department. 'Nothing short of catastrophic': What officials didn't tell the public about toxic disasters post-Harvey The personnel from Idaho National Laboratory whose gear was stolen were part of the Off-Site Radioactive Source Recovery Program based at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, with an annual budget of about $17 million.<doc-sep>
An unknown amount of radioactive nuclear material that was stolen from the rental car of two Department of Energy security experts in San Antonio more than a year ago is still missing, according to a new report. A new report from the Center for Public Integrity details how the materials were stolen from the back of a rental car while parked overnight at a hotel last year. The theft was previously unannounced by the FBI or the San Antonio police. According to the Center for Public Integrity report, two Department of Energy specialists drove to San Antonio to pick up nuclear material from a research lab and transport it to an Idaho lab. ADVERTISEMENT But before they were able to complete the mission, radioactive material that they brought with them to calibrate radiation detectors was stolen from their vehicle while they stayed at a hotel in a high-crime area on their trip to Idaho. More than a year later, the Center for Public Integrity found that the materials, a small amount of plutonium and cesium, have not been located, and are now among an unknown amount of military-grade nuclear materials that have gone missing over the years. The Center for Public Integrity found that the government has been lax about tracking military-owned nuclear materials and opaque about when it goes missing. The publication unearthed the details of the San Antonio incident after it was briefly described in an internal Department of Energy report. Idaho National Laboratory spokeswoman Sarah Neumann told CPI that the amount of material stolen was not enough to create a nuclear bomb, and that there is “little or no danger” from the materials being lost. The Department of Energy declined to comment for CPI’s investigation. The investigation found “gaps” in the amount of plutonium produced by weapons companies and the amount that the government can account for. There is an entire distinction for the missing material: “MUF,” or “material unaccounted for.” According to CPI, the personnel from Idaho whose gear was stolen were part of the Off-Site Radioactive Source Recovery Program based at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. That group has an annual budget of $17 million and is overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration. The program has reportedly gathered as much as 38,000 bits of radioactive material loaned to research centers, hospitals and academic institutions since 1999. The Obama administration touted its prioritization of overseeing military-grade nuclear materials with the same vigor as civilian nuclear materials. The Trump administration has also said that keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists is a “significant” priority. The Nuclear Regulatory commission has imposed fines on six civilian institutions in recent months for mishandling or losing nuclear materials, including against Idaho State University.