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 inventory loss before 1968 , and 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 .