June 12, 2017
Nuclear material doled out ‘like it was candy’ 50 years ago
Maybe the only way to know the whereabouts of 200 pounds of bomb-grade uranium allegedly missing from an Apollo processing plant since the 1960s is to dig up the skeletons…
Maybe the only way to know the whereabouts of 200 pounds of bomb-grade uranium allegedly missing from an Apollo processing plant since the 1960s is to dig up the skeletons in the backyard — a 50-year-old nuclear waste dump.
The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC) of Apollo came up short on highly enriched uranium in 1965, essentially bomb-grade nuclear material for a nuclear-fueled rocket intended to fly to Mars.
The company and its officers were suspected by some of diverting the uranium to Israel for its secret bomb program, but there was no hard evidence and numerous government investigations over the decades came up empty — no indictments, no charges and no definitive information on where the material could be.
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