This story is being re-posted. On 29 April 2013, The Washington Post published a very long feature story about the penetration of the Oak Ridge nuclear facility by the three activists in 2012:"The Prophets of Oak Ridge".
The Y-12 nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the U.S. government's only facility for handling, processing and storing weapons-grade uranium, was temporarily shut down after three anti-nuclear activists, including an 82-year-old nun, breached security fences on 28 July 2012. The Oak Ridge plant is one of the most important government installations involved in the maintenance and production of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The Y-12 nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the U.S. government's only facility for handling, processing and storing weapons-grade uranium, was temporarily shut down after three anti-nuclear activists, including an 82-year-old nun, breached security fences on 28 July 2012. The Oak Ridge plant is one of the most important government installations involved in the maintenance and production of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The activists, calling themselves “Transform Now Plowshares”, were identified as Megan Rice, 82, Michael Walli, 63 and Greg Boertje-Obed, 57. They cut through perimeter fences to reach the outer wall of a building where highly enriched uranium, a key nuclear bomb component, is stored. They passed through four fences and walked for "over two hours" before reaching the uranium storage building, on which they hung banners and strung crime-scene tape. The building serves as the U.S. Government’s only "warehouse" for storing highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons.
(See this New York Times article, "The Nun Who Broke into the Nuclear Sanctum", a portrait of Sister Rice.)
Ralph Hutchinson, coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, said the group's intention was not to demonstrate the lack of security at the plant, but to take a stance against the making of nuclear weapons. "It wasn't so they could show how easy it was to bust into this bomb plant, it was because the production of nuclear weapons violates everything that is moral and good," Hutchinson said. "It is a war crime."