The Bay Area is sitting on a nuclear time bomb

Quiet as it's kept, close to San Francisco sits a commercial facility with enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon — on the scale of the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.

General Electric Hitachi owns the Nuclear Test Reactor in Sunol, between Fremont and Pleasanton.

Like facilities at some universities, the reactor's main activity is neutron radiography, which enables clients to look inside objects without destroying them. But this reactor contains at least 7 pounds of highly enriched uranium, the same material used in the Hiroshima bomb.

For a civilian facility in the age of violent extremism, this is extraordinary.