Date

Nov 9, 1979

Description

Charles Keller of AEC’s Oak Ridge Operations Office (OROO) led external oversight of uranium accounting at Apollo that led to the discovery that HEU was missing in unusual quantities. He then participated in AEC’s independent inventory in late 1965 that established how much HEU was missing. Years later, Keller recounted his assessment of the situation in 1965 in an interview with the FBI. “His [Keller’s] gut feeling is that NUMEC probably lost a major part of the material through mishandling and sloppy operations …. Mr. Keller felt that a great deal of collusion would have been required to remove 50 kilograms of enriched uranium. It would also be difficult to ship this amount of material to another company with forged documents because this would require collusion with someone in another plant, which would be even more difficult.” The NRC staff later concluded it would have been relatively easy to remove the material from the Apollo plant.[17] After opining on peripheral matters, Keller summarized for the FBI his assessment of the NUMEC situation. “He said essentially the problem in a nutshell is that the material was not there that the books said should have been there but there is absolutely no way to say how or where it went. His opinion is that sloppy plant operations, lack of records, and improper sampling probably [were] the reason for the loss. He indicated, however, that if he [were] planning to steal nuclear material he would use exactly this kind of operation, i.e., sloppy handling and accounting procedures.”

Source

FBI FOIA File No. 117-2564, no document number, p. 65-130.

Document published in following posting(s):

The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel's Nuclear Weapons Program?

Nov 2, 2016

Interview of Charles A. Keller, Assistant Manager for Manufacturing and Support, Oak Ridge Operations Office, U.S. Department of Energy, "Atomic Energy Act; Obstruction of Justice," FBI report of [redacted], November 9, 1979, labeled TOP SECRET before redaction and release.