Los Alamos Safety Concerns Force Activity Pause

Nuclear safety concerns spurred Los Alamos National Laboratory managers to shut down limited operations late last month in a plutonium storage area, laboratory officials said yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 13).

Some activity was suspended at Technical Area 55 in four plutonium storage vaults, where technical auditors had expressed concern that the New Mexico laboratory’s safety evaluations were insufficient, KUNM radio reported yesterday.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board issued an Aug. 31 notice to the laboratory expressing concern about the site’s “criticality safety evaluations,” the calculations that assess the danger of stored plutonium initiating a nuclear chain reaction.

“It means that there might be too much plutonium put in one glove box, or one room or one area,” said laboratory critic Greg Mello, head of the Los Alamos Study Group.  “If there’s too much put together then it will explode or melt, bathing the area in neutrons, killing anybody who happens to be around.”

The board said 20 CSEs were convoluted, contradictory or technically deficient, and that another 300 were potentially problematic, KUNM reported.

The laboratory paused vault activities on Sept. 21 to recalculate its risk assessments.  Some activities resumed Sept. 27, said laboratory spokesman Kevin Roark.

The incident suggests the laboratory has a long way to go to improve its safety practices, Mello said.

“Los Alamos has a number of deficiencies in its criticality safety program,” he said.  “People had to be evacuated from a room this summer because too much plutonium was put into one glove box.  So it’s not just a theoretical problem, it’s something that is a very real problem” (Jim Williams, KUNM.org (audio file), Oct. 10).

Roark played down the significance of the pause, saying it was taken as a preventive and precautionary measure.

“This is the lab’s climate of safety,” he said.  “We’re not going to have another criticality accident here if we can help it.”

Longtime supporter Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) also praised the laboratory’s actions, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.

“A routine review of safety-related analyses for a plutonium storage area suggested that the safety margins may be smaller than previously thought,” he said in a statement.  “As a precaution, a decision to suspend certain material movements was made pending a more thorough analysis.”

“As I understand it, there has not been any accident or similar triggering event.  No one has been harmed.  Indeed, this action was taken to ensure higher levels of safety in the future,” Domenici added (Wendy Brown, Santa Fe New Mexican, Oct. 9).

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