An Energy Department Inspector General five-year follow-up investigation to a 2010 IG report found that Los Alamos National Laboratory had acted to improve nuclear safety at its Plutonium Facility, had established a Safety Basis Quality Review Board, and implemented a program to assign responsibilities and authorities, define policies and requirements, and provide for the performance and assessment of lab work processes, yet LANL has continued to struggle with “fully implementing” several critical nuclear safety management requirements, a DOE IG report released yesterday states.
Significant findings of the report, titled “Follow-up on Nuclear Safety: Safety Basis and Quality Assurance at the Los Alamos National Laboratory,” included statements that LANL “had not always” developed safety basis documents that met NNSA’s expectations to ensure that nuclear hazards had been fully identified and that mitigation controls had been implemented, hadn’t always resolved issues identified in the annual updates to the safety bases for the Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility and the Waste Characterization, Reduction and Repackaging Facility, and that LANL had not always resolved “significant and long-standing nuclear safety deficiencies,” including noncompliance with criticality safety controls to prevent fissile materials from causing a nuclear chain reaction at PF-4.
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