There was another criticality safety scare at the Los Alamos National Laboratory over the summer, the federal government’s independent defense-nuclear watchdog disclosed in a recent report.
On Aug. 18, personnel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Plutonium Facility moved a shell into an area that already contained plutonium, according to a report uploaded to the Washington-based Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB) website. Facility rules allow either plutonium metal or shells to be in the area, but not both at once, DNFSB wrote. Personnel discovered the violations on Aug. 21, according to the board report.
A shell is part of a plutonium pit: the radioactive core of a nuclear weapon. LANL’s Plutonium Facility will be the main production site for plutonium pits for the U.S. nuclear arms modernization program put in place by the Barack Obama administration, barring major policy changes as part of a nuclear posture review the Donald Trump administration expects to finish this year.
After the incident, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s LANL Field Office “disqualified” the workers who were involved with the mishap and paused shell-casting operations at the Plutonium Facility, according to a DNFSB report dated Sept. 1.
“The incident on August 18, 2017 was not a criticality accident,” a Los Alamos National Laboratory spokesperson said in a Sunday email. “Our workers self-reported the fact that certain administrative limits were exceeded. There was never any risk of a criticality accident. However, because of the Laboratory’s focus on adhering to our safety rules, we suspended the workers’ qualifications until they completed the appropriate re-training.”
The spokesperson said the laboratory always carries out fact-finding programs after such an event. “The purpose of these fact finding exercises is to keep our criticality safety program, which is committed to continuous improvement, ever vigilant when it comes to making our national security work as safe as possible to workers, the public and our environment.”
The laboratory has been dinged for a number of nuclear safety breaches in recent years. In June, LANL air-mailed plutonium to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that was supposed to be sent by ground. In 2014, a drum of plutonium-contaminated waste from LANL burst open and released radiation into the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
After the 2014 accident, DOE announced it would not pick up further options on Los Alamos National Security’s prime contract, which was awarded in 2006 and is worth about $2 billion a year. Competition is slated to start on a successor contract this month or next, DOE has said.
Meanwhile, The five-member DNFSB is slated to meet Tuesday in Washington to discuss emergency preparedness across the DOE nuclear complex.
Frank Klotz, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, had been invited to attend this week’s public meeting, along with Energy Secretary Rick Perry and other DOE officials. The meeting was delayed earlier this month, and last week the board announced Klotz and his DOE colleagues would not attend.
Editor’s Note, Sept. 25, 2017, 12:25 p.m. The story was corrected to say DNFSB will meet Tuesday in Washington.
