Plutonium was stolen from a government official’s car last year. It's still missing.

Plutonium went missing from the back seat of government worker's car last March, and the Department of Energy still has no idea where it went.

In March 2017, two Energy Department officials were supposed to drive from an Idaho lab to pick up some nuclear materials in San Antonio, Texas, and bring them back safely, The Center for Public Integrity reports. They rented a Ford Expedition, packed some plutonium and cesium, and eventually stopped at a Marriott hotel for the night. In the morning, the nuclear materials they left in the back seat were gone.

Notably, the two so-called energy experts didn't even pick up their intended cargo in San Antonio before losing the radioactive elements they brought from home. Plutonium and cesium are used to calibrate radiation detectors, which the experts would've needed to do before measuring the San Antonio materials to ensure they grabbed the right stuff, per CPI.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That was more than a year ago. Yet San Antonio police and the FBI never publicly announced the dangerous and valuable materials went missing, CPI says. In fact, police and the FBI only discussed the case by phone. And it's not an uncommon story: Plutonium has silently disappeared from U.S. military stockpiles for years despite presidential pledges to safeguard it from would-be terrorists.

Officials won't disclose just how much plutonium went missing — but don't worry, a spokeswoman assured CPI, it's not enough to make a bomb. Read more at The Center for Public Integrity.