The Apollo Affair

The Apollo Affair was a 1965 incident in which a US company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), in the Pittsburgh suburbs of Apollo and Parks Township, Pennsylvania was investigated for losing 200-600 pounds of highly enriched uranium. In 1965, the FBI investigated Zalman Shapiro, the company's president, over the loss 200 pounds of highly enriched uranium. After investigations by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, other government agencies, and inquiring reporters, no charges were ever filed. A General Accounting Office study of the investigations declassified in May 2010 stated "We believe a timely, concerted effort on the part of these three agencies would have greatly aided and possibly solved the NUMEC diversion questions, if they desired to do so."

Some remain convinced that Israel received 200 pounds of enriched uranium from NUMEC, particularly given the visit of Rafi Eitan, later revealed as an Israeli spy and who was later involved in the Jonathan Pollard incident. In June 1986, analyst Anthony Cordesman told United Press International:

"There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.”"

In his 1991 book, The Samson Option, Seymour Hersh concluded that Shapiro did not divert any uranium; rather "it ended up in the air and water of the city of Apollo as well as in the ducts, tubes, and floors of the NUMEC plant." He also wrote that Shapiro's meetings with senior Israeli officials in his home were related to protecting the water supply in Israel rather than any diversion of nuclear material or information. A later investigation was conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (successor to the AEC) regarding an additional 198 pounds of uranium that was found to be missing between 1974 and 1976, after the plant had been purchased by Babcock & Wilcox and Shapiro was no longer associated with the company. That investigation found that more than 110 pounds of it could be accounted for by what was called "previously unidentified and undocumented loss mechanisms", including "contamination of workers' clothes, losses from scrubber systems, material embedded in the flooring, and residual deposits in the processing equipment." Hersh further quoted one of the main investigators, Carl Duckett, as saying "I know of nothing at all to indicate that Shapiro was guilty."

In 1993, Glenn T. Seaborg, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission wrote a book, The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon, Adjusting to Troubled Times which devoted a chapter to Shapiro and NUMEC, the last sentence of which states:

"Distinguished as Shapiro's career has been, one cannot but wonder whether it might not have been even more illustrious had these unjust charges not been leveled against him."

Later U.S. Department of Energy records show that NUMEC had the largest highly enriched uranium inventory loss of all U.S. commercial sites, with a 269 kg inventory loss before 1968, and 76 kg thereafter.

At the prompting of Zalman Shapiro's lawyer, senator Arlen Specter asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to clear him of any suspicion of diversion in August 2009. The NRC refused, stating it did "not have information that would allow it to unequivocally conclude that nuclear material was not diverted from the site..."

The US Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing a cleanup of contaminated land at the site of NUMEC's waste disposal, currently scheduled to be completed in 2015.