The Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments said it will investigate the radioactive contamination in January of some Triad National Security employees at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility.
The facility is in the early stages of an overhaul and expansion necessary for the lab to annually produce 30 war-ready plutonium pits by 2026, and, according to the law, multiple nuclear-weapon primary-stage cores before then.
The January incident involved six members of the lab’s Materials Recovery and Recycle Aqueous Chloride Team, two of who were found to have contamination on their skin. One of these people required outpatient treatment.
The Office of Enterprise Assessments disclosed the impending investigation in a notice posted online Thursday and dated July 19.
There have been a number of publicly acknowledged hiccups in PF-4 over the past several years, including a 280-gallon flood in 2021 pinned on an inexperienced technician and a pair of contamination incidents in 2020 involving the same sort of ergonomic glovebox gloves.
The flood last year shut down PF-4 for three weeks, even as Los Alamos was gearing up to produce the first proof-of-concept pit for a W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead. This first production unit pit was scheduled to be finished by fiscal year 2023, which begins in a little more than two months.
