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photo/Paul Efird

Apparently it's L-I-B-Y-A.

Every time I ask a question with that word in it, Oak Ridge folks act like I've asked them for the PIN to their bank cards.

Still, I persist.

Most recently, I asked for an update regarding the uranium-enrichment equipment that was transported from Libya to the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge in early 2004.

Steven Wyatt, the federal spokesman at Y-12, was extremely tight-lipped, but later came back with an e-mail response. "There has been no change in status for the equipment," he said.

Wyatt would not elaborate and never used the word "Libya" in any discussion. He did, however, indicate that "no change" meant Y-12 was sticking to its most recent response, which was in late-July 2006. At that time, Wyatt said, "The equipment is still being stored in Oak Ridge and is awaiting disposition."

The brevity of comment nowadays compares starkly to the Bush administration's trumpeting of events back in 2004, when President Bush and other top officials visited Oak Ridge to celebrate the coup in which Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi gave up work on weapons of mass destruction.

At a March event, the Libyan centifuges and other nuclear-related hardware were laid out under tents in a Y-12 parking lot for invited media members from across the country to peruse and photograph. (see photo above)

"What you have witnessed here is a big, big victory," then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said with no modesty at all.

Just a few months later, Bush and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice visited Oak Ridge and inspected the same equipment, which had been moved temporarily to a facility at ORNL for their viewing convenience.

After that, there was little fanfare and not much information on the cache of Libyan stuff.

With one notable execption.

In 2005, Dennis Ruddy,the general manager at Y-12, addressed the Libyan issue on a couple of occasions in response to questions.

In a late September interview, Ruddy said, "There's a lot of interest in the things that we brought back from Libya because a lot of them, looking at them, measuring the tolerances, setting them up and operating them, to a certain extent tells us how close people are to be able to get a system that can work all the way to bomb-grade material."

A couple of weeks later, Ruddy was relieved of his duties at Y-12, apparently because his security clearance was pulled for breaching classification -- although that was never officially confirmed.

About the closest statement in that regard came from plant spokesman Mike Monnett, who said, "Because Dennis Ruddy can no longer meet the requirements necessary for employment at a nuclear weapons site, he has been reassigned to duties at (BWXT) headquarters."

Y-12 workers were emphatically instructed not to talk on the subject and, even now, a couple of years later, any question on the topic(s) is greeted with mostly silence and highly sanitized responses.

That's that.

via blogs.knoxnews.com