Government transparency is all well and good, but on some occasions it goes too far. A U.S. government agency has mistakenly published details of civilian nuclear facilities, including the locations of uranium supplies, on its Web site.

While most of the pages are marked “highly confidential safeguards sensitive”, Energy Secretary Steven Chu says, “there’s no secret classified information that’s been compromised”. The consistent message from officials today is that everything in the document is already in the public domain, but that this document is a much simpler way of getting all the information in one go – which is of some concern.

The 266-page report was published in an online newsletter from the Government Printing Office. That’s the federal agency which is responsible for the logistics of printing, handling and archiving documents for national agencies, Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. The list was withdrawn on Tuesday, apparently after the GPO received inquiries from the New York Times.

The report does not include any details of weapons, but is a detailed (and likely complete) list of nuclear power stations, stockpiles and labs. Officially the report is confidential but not classified, meaning that although it is intended to be kept secret, there is unlikely to be any legal penalty for the breach.

Officials are stepping up security at sites, most notably the Y-12 Oak Ridge lab in Tennessee. The report includes precise details of the location of a uranium store at the facility.

The report had been prepared for the International Atomic Energy Agency. The hope is that by providing such data to the IAEA, the US will have a better case for forcing countries such as Iran to follow suit. It appears the  “highly confidential safeguards sensitive” label is an IAEA classification term rather than one the U.S. government would normally apply to documents.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 4:01 pm under Leaks, Politics, Security.

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