Car Crashes into Nuke Lab

It's been almost more than 10 days since one of our nuclear labs had a freaky security incident*. So I guess we were overdue for this:

A driver ran a checkpoint at a nuclear weapons plant early Monday and crashed into a barrier, then fled on foot, authorities said.

Guards at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, a primary storehouse for bomb-grade uranium, said the man "appeared to be impaired in some way" when they stopped him around 5 a.m. at a security checkpoint near a rear entrance, spokesman Bill Wilburn said.

They asked him for identification, but the man hit the gas and drove through the checkpoint, then crashed into security barriers a short distance away, Wilburn said.

"When he hit that, he jumped out of the car and ran away. He left the car there with the engine still running," Wilburn said. He said the guards told him the car had been hot-wired.

Wilburn said no weapons were in the car. "They checked the car very thoroughly before they moved it. They found nothing," he said.

Oak Ridge police were searching for the driver.

Steve Wyatt, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration in Oak Ridge, which oversees the Y-12 plant, downplayed the crash, saying it was "next to nothing." The plant makes and dismantles uranium parts in nuclear warheads.

Hopefully, the Y-12 guards' training has been brought up to snuff in the last couple of years. Because, back in 2004, the Energy Department's Inspector General found that the Y-12 security force had been cheating during their anti-terrorism drills -- for maybe as long as 20 years.

* UPDATE: Just to be clear, I'm not trying to imply that the Y-12 staff should be blamed for the crash. I was just trying to point out -- lamely, it would appear -- that these labs are like magnets to the odd and sometimes dangerous. I'm thinking of the Los Alamos caveman, for instance. Or the meth lab with secret info inside.