William Crooks has replaced Andrew Wysong as head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Nuclear Criticality Safety Division, a lab spokesperson said Monday.
The change, effective July 20, was first disclosed publicly in a weekly Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board site report from the nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico.
Crooks will be responsible for enforcing the lab’s rules for preventing accident runaway nuclear chain reactions.
“Crooks has been part of the Laboratory’s Nuclear Criticality Safety Committee since 2007, serving as the chair from 2015-2017,” the Los Alamos spokesperson said by email.
Crooks has been at Los Alamos 16 years, most recently as the group leader for the lab’s Nuclear Engineering and Nonproliferation Division. He has a doctorate in inorganic chemistry from Florida State University, the spokesperson said.
Wysong led the Criticality Safety Division for about three years, according to his personal website. He is now the nuclear operations integration manager in the Nuclear Operations Directorate at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Los Alamos spokesperson wrote. There, according to his resume, Wysong is responsible for ” interpreting guidance regarding compliance with the DOE Orders, and liaison with the Livermore DOE Field Office…on regulatory interpretation of the DOE Order,” along with implementation of nuclear safety requirements” at the California lab’s nuclear facilities.
The spokesperson did not say why Wysong changed jobs.
Los Alamos has drawn some bad press in recent years for violations of its criticality safety standards. In 2011, as reported in 2017 by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, lab personnel photographed samples of plutonium metal that were closer together than lab safety rules allowed.
The last accidental criticality at Los Alamos occurred in 1946.
