Once again a media report comes out in regard to the Oak Ridge DOE facilities which equates any DOE operation in Oak Ridge with ORNL. As additional information on this case has shown, the employee arrested today worked at ETTP, the old K-25 plant managed by Bechtel Jacobs. When early reports such as this one mentioned theft of uranium enrichment information it was quite obvious that this was unlikely to be an issue at ORNL.

ORNL is an energy research lab with many other specialties including High Performance Computing and Materials study. It is not part of the nuclear weapon complex. It is the western labs (including Los Alamos and Sandia) where weapons design takes place. Y-12 in Oak Ridge is a weapons manufacturing plant. It is my understanding ORNL has little, if anything, to do with the weapons program.

You can understand WNBC and MSNBC getting mixed up. It irritates me when the local media outlets screw it up. There was a story a while back about something at Y-12. The TV reporters were standing in front of the Y-12 entrance sign (where the Hiroshima protesters will be in a couple of weeks) talking about ORNL. In that instance only WVLT had the correct designation of Y-12; WBIR and WATE reported it as ORNL.

I sent WBIR a message back then to urge they teach their new reporters about Y-12 vs. ORNL vs. ETTP as they teach them how to pronounce Blount (not Blunt) County, Lenoir (not the French le Noir) City, and Sevierville (not SEEVER ville). Checking WBIR's story this afternoon I was glad to see that they had the correct information and I emailed them congratulations. As usual, Frank Munger (a fellow Maryville High School alum) knew his Oak Ridge geography and reported it correctly in the News-Sentinel.

I spoke with an employee at Y-12 today who I used to work with. He said that when Al Gore visited his building (on Union Valley Rd) which is a part of Y-12, he kept referring to it as ORNL. No one corrected him.

I am thinking Homer Simpson got himself busted.