{"id":373095,"date":"2017-06-22T05:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-06-22T11:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=373095"},"modified":"2017-06-27T18:24:02","modified_gmt":"2017-06-28T00:24:02","slug":"safety-problems-at-a-los-alamos-laboratory-delay-u-s-nuclear-warhead-testing-and-production","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2017\/06\/safety-problems-at-a-los-alamos-laboratory-delay-u-s-nuclear-warhead-testing-and-production\/","title":{"rendered":"Safety problems at a Los Alamos laboratory delay U.S. nuclear warhead testing and production"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_373102\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 771px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-373102\" src=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nnsa-pf4-aerial-1440-771x498.jpg\" alt=\"Plutonium Facility-4 at Los Alamos National Laboratory\" width=\"771\" height=\"498\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nnsa-pf4-aerial-1440-771x498.jpg 771w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nnsa-pf4-aerial-1440-336x217.jpg 336w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nnsa-pf4-aerial-1440-768x496.jpg 768w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nnsa-pf4-aerial-1440.jpg 817w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">NNSA\/ U.S. Department of Energy<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Plutonium Facility-4 at Los Alamos National Laboratory houses plutonium operations vital to the lab\u2019s national security mission, but work there has been mostly paused since June 2013.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>In mid-2013, four federal nuclear safety experts brought an alarming message to the top official in charge of America\u2019s warhead production: Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nation\u2019s sole site for making and testing a key nuclear bomb part, wasn\u2019t taking needed safety precautions. The lab, they said, was ill-prepared to prevent an accident that could kill lab workers, and potentially others nearby.<\/p>\n<p>Some safety infractions had already occurred at the lab that year. But Neile Miller, who was then the acting head of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, says those experts specifically told her that Los Alamos didn\u2019t have enough personnel who knew how to handle plutonium so it didn\u2019t accidentally go \u201ccritical\u201d and start an uncontrolled chain reaction.<\/p>\n<p>Such chain reactions generate intense bursts of deadly radiation, and over the last half-century have claimed nearly two dozen lives. The precise consequences, Miller said in a recent interview, \u201cdid not need an explanation. You don\u2019t want an accident involving criticality and plutonium.\u201d Indeed, Miller said, criticality \u201cis one of those trigger words\u201d that immediately gets the attention of those responsible for preventing a nuclear weapons disaster.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"module align-left half type-aside\">\n<h3>About this article<\/h3>\n<p>This story was originally published\u00a0by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/apps.publicintegrity.org\/nuclear-negligence\/delayed-warheads\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Center for Public Integrity<\/a>, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n<p>Read the full series, &#8220;Nuclear Negligence,&#8221; from the Center for Public Integrity <a href=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/series\/nuclear-negligence\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>With two of the four experts remaining in her Washington office overlooking the national mall, Miller picked up the phone and called the lab\u2019s director, Charles McMillan, at his own office on the idyllic Los Alamos campus in the New Mexico mountains, where nuclear weapons work is financed by a federal payment exceeding $2 billion a year. She recommended that a sensitive facility conducting plutonium operations \u2014 inside a building known as PF-4 \u2014 be shut down, immediately, while the safety deficiencies were fixed.<\/p>\n<p>McMillan, a nuclear physicist and weapons designer with government-funded compensation exceeding a million dollars a year, responded that he had believed the problems could be solved while that lab kept operating. He was \u201creluctant\u201d to shut it down, Miller recalled. But as the call proceeded, he became open to her view that the risks were too high, she added. So on McMillan\u2019s order, the facility was shut within a day, with little public notice.<\/p>\n<p>In the secrecy-shrouded world of America\u2019s nuclear weapons work, that decision had far-reaching consequences. Shuttering a key part of PF-4 abruptly halted two types of sensitive work done nowhere else in the United States, for roughly the next four years: The invasive sampling and analysis of selected aging nuclear weapons cores to ensure that intact models could all still function as intended; and the production of new cores that could be fit into more modern nuclear weapons or replace those pulled apart in testing.<\/p>\n<p>The shutdown was not expected to last nearly so long, but Los Alamos\u2019s managers have struggled for years to meet basic safety standards and had difficulty getting the lab back to full operations. The exact cost to taxpayers is unclear, but internally Los Alamos estimated in 2013 that idling the facility where such work is conducted costs more than a million dollars a day in lost productivity alone.<\/p>\n<p>And these safety challenges aren\u2019t confined to Los Alamos. The Center\u2019s probe revealed worker safety risks, previously unpublicized accidents, and dangerously lax management practices at other nuclear weapons-related facilities. The investigation further found that penalties for these practices were relatively light, and that many of the firms that run these facilities were awarded tens of millions of dollars in profits in the same years that major safety lapses occurred. Some were awarded new contracts despite repeated, avoidable accidents, including some that exposed workers to radiation.<\/p>\n<p>But the consequences also extend to America\u2019s overall national security. The years-long halt in the invasive testing of plutonium cores, or \u201cpits\u201d as they are also known, means that between 2013 and this year, the United States has not been able to examine in detail how well or poorly the cores of the most critical warheads in its arsenal have been aging. Among them: warheads carried by America\u2019s nuclear submarines and land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, plus an older type of warhead still stockpiled for use by strategic bombers.<\/p>\n<p>The government has generally not publicized how disruptive the hiatus at Los Alamos has been, although telltale data appear in obscure reports by the National Nuclear Security Administration. They reveal that nuclear weapons scientists had planned to check 29 plutonium cores with invasive testing at Los Alamos over the past four years. But that schedule had to be scrapped, and it was not until the second half of 2016 that the lab scheduled two such tests. One failed and the other was cancelled due to poor safety preparations.<\/p>\n<p>Ordinarily, new warhead pits are produced steadily by technicians at PF-4 for installation in modernized weapons, to replace some of those pits withdrawn for testing, and to keep workers there trained and agile. But Los Alamos has not fabricated any new plutonium cores for existing or modernized warheads since 2011. And restarting that work safely is not the only challenge: Last July, an internal NNSA report said this core fabrication work will likely cost the government at least an extra $100 million over the next four years beyond the funds already set aside for such work, due to rising equipment costs.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe laboratory shut down an important facility doing important work,\u201d said James McConnell, the NNSA\u2019s associate administrator for safety, infrastructure, and operations, in a recent interview at the agency\u2019s Washington headquarters. \u201cWhat we didn\u2019t have was the quality program that we want.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Key lab remains only partly active<\/h3>\n<p>Los Alamos and the NNSA have publicly boasted that PF-4 has recently been fully restarted, but in truth, it\u2019s only accomplished exercises and dry runs of its most important missions.<\/p>\n<p>The little-known hiatus has forced the directors of the three principal U.S. weapons laboratories to rely on other types of reliability tests, mostly conducted at other U.S. nuclear weapons facilities, when they promised in annual reports to the President and the Congress that the country\u2019s warheads will still explode in the manner intended by their designers. The highly classified reports, known as ROSAs, for Report on Stockpile Assessment, did not highlight the pit testing interruption, according to two people who have read them.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Through Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark, McMillan declined CPI\u2019s request to be interviewed, and the laboratory did not respond to questions about his conversation with Miller, the lab\u2019s safety record, or the consequences of the shutdown. But that interruption of Los Alamos\u2019s pit production and testing \u2014 the latter of which is meant to substitute in part for full-scale explosive nuclear testing \u2014 has made some of those responsible for managing the nuclear stockpile uncomfortable.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were obviously quite concerned about\u201d the shutdown at Los Alamos, recalled Ernest Moniz, the MIT physicist who was President Obama\u2019s Secretary of Energy from May 2013 to January 2017, in an interview with the Center. Moniz said he considered the situation there a \u201cmess\u201d and the invasive testing interruption \u201csignificant.\u201d The shutdown blocked, he said, the planned production of some new cores for nuclear warheads. He and Frank Klotz, the NNSA director, took a special trip to the lab in in 2014 to emphasize that restarting its work was \u201ca very high priority,\u201d Moniz added.<\/p>\n<p>Klotz declined to be interviewed but in a statement issued on June 19, in response to an article the Center published that day, said Los Alamos had \u201cdemonstrated improvements in its performance of operational tasks\u201d and had worked to minimize the impact of the pause on \u201cthe safety and reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile.\u201d He also said the NNSA had held Los Alamos \u201caccountable for these issues.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Richard Garwin, a retired IBM physicist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient who has long been a technical adviser on nuclear weapons and stockpile surveillance to the Defense Department and the NNSA, said the government had not been transparent enough about the long lapse in testing and production. He echoed Moniz in asserting that the existing plutonium cores \u2014 built to trigger a release of energy that in turn powers a thermonuclear explosion of immense destructive power \u2014 will still function, because they are extremely durable.<\/p>\n<p>But Garwin said \u201cit\u2019s extremely embarrassing\u201d for the lab to be unable to carry out its planned tests. \u201cHow could they screw up so badly? We\u2019re not getting our money\u2019s worth out of the people at Los Alamos.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>A unique task, unfulfilled for the past four years<\/h3>\n<p>Before the work was halted in 2013, those overseeing the U.S. nuclear arsenal typically pulled six or seven warheads from bombers or missiles every year for dismantlement and invasive diagnostic testing. One reason is that the unstable metals that act as spark plugs for the bombs \u2014 plutonium and highly-enriched uranium \u2014 bathe themselves and nearby electrical components in radiation, with sometimes unpredictable consequences; another is that all the bombs\u2019 metallic components are subject to normal, sometimes fitful corrosion.<\/p>\n<p>Plutonium also slowly decays, with some of its isotopes becoming uranium. And the special high explosives fabricated by nuclear scientists to compress the plutonium cores in a deliberate detonation also have an unstable molecular structure.<\/p>\n<p>Invasive testing provides details vital to the computer modeling and scientifically simulated plutonium behavior that has replaced nuclear testing, said DOE consultant David Overskei. He compared the pit \u2014 so named because it is spherical and positioned near the center of a warhead \u2014 to the heart of a human being, explaining that destructive testing is like taking a blood sample capable of exposing harmful maladies.<\/p>\n<p>The aim, as Vice President Joe Biden said in a 2010 National Defense University speech, has been to \u201canticipate potential problems and reduce their impact on our arsenal.\u201d Weapons designers say it\u2019s what anyone would do if they were storing a car for years while still expecting the engine to start and the vehicle to speed down the road at the sudden turn of a key.<\/p>\n<p>Typically, warheads selected for testing are first sent to the Energy Department\u2019s Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Technicians there gently separate their components \u2014 such as the detonators \u2014 at that site; they also send the pits \u2014 used in a primary nuclear explosion \u2014 to Los Alamos, and the highly-enriched uranium \u2014 used in a secondary explosion \u2014 to Oak Ridge, Tenn. The arming, fusing and firing mechanisms are tested by Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque and other locations.<\/p>\n<p>At Los Alamos, the pits are brought to Plutonium Facility-4 (PF-4), a boxy, two-story, concrete building with a footprint the size of two city blocks. \u00a0Inside are hundreds of special \u201cglove boxes\u201d for working with plutonium, a series of individual laboratories, and a special vault, in which containers hold plutonium on racks meant to ensure that escaping neutrons don\u2019t collide too often with other atoms, provoking them to fission uncontrollably. Only a small portion of the building is normally used for pit surveillance, while about a fifth is used for pit fabrication, and another seven percent for analytical chemistry and pit certification. Budget documents indicate that annual federal spending for the work centered there is nearly $200 million.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Los Alamos Plutonium Facility is a unique and essential national security capability,\u201d McMillan, the lab\u2019s director, said last September during a visit by then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who watched as technicians \u2014 attempting to restart their work after the lengthy hiatus \u2014 used pressing machines and other equipment to fabricate a mock pit, rather than a usable one.<\/p>\n<p>The building lies in the middle of a 40-acre campus in the mountains above Santa Fe hastily built during World War II to coordinate the construction of the two nuclear bombs used in Japan. Los Alamos is still considered the foremost U.S. nuclear weapons facility \u2014 where six of the nine warheads currently in the U.S. arsenal were designed, and where plutonium-based power supplies for most of the nation\u2019s deep-space probes are fabricated. Hundreds of nuclear physicists work there.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, it also has an active seismic zone beneath the PF-4 building, producing persistent worries among the staff and members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a congressionally-chartered oversight group, that if it experienced a rare, large earthquake, the roof could collapse and toss chunks of plutonium so closely together a chain reaction would ensue, spewing radioactive, cancer-causing plutonium particles throughout nearby residential communities.<\/p>\n<p>Millions of dollars have already been spent to diminish this<a href=\"https:\/\/energy.gov\/sites\/prod\/files\/2014\/12\/f19\/Keilers-%20LANL%20PF-4%20Seismic%20Safety.pdf\">\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/energy.gov\/sites\/prod\/files\/2014\/12\/f19\/Keilers-%20LANL%20PF-4%20Seismic%20Safety.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">risk<\/a>, which until recently exceeded federal guidelines, and the Trump administration last month proposed spending $14 million in 2018 alone to strengthen the building\u2019s firewalls and sprinkler systems. The government has also sunk more than $450 million into preparations for construction of a modern and more seismically durable pit production facility at Los Alamos, projected to have a total price tag between $1.5 billion and $3 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Making new pits involves melting, casting and machining the plutonium, while assessing how well or poorly the pits are aging requires using various instruments to withdraw small pieces for detailed chemical and material analysis. These operations are typically done in the glove boxes, by specialists whose hands are inserted into gloves attached to the side of sealed containers meant to keep the plutonium particles from escaping. But the work is messy, requiring constant vigilance to be certain that too much of the metal doesn\u2019t pile up in a compact space. The byproducts include \u201cchunks, shards, and grains of plutonium metal,\u201d all of it radioactive and unstable, according to a 2015 Congressional Research Service report.<\/p>\n<p>Notably, a 2013 Los Alamos study depicted leaks of glove boxes at PF-4 as frequent \u2014 averaging nearly three a month \u2014 and said they were often caused by avoidable errors such as inattention, improper maintenance, collisions with rolling storage carts, complacency and degradation from the heat that plutonium constantly emits. It said that sometimes those operating or supervising the equipment \u201caccepted risk\u201d or took a chance, rushed to meet a deadline, or otherwise succumbed to workplace production pressures.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOperations always wants it yesterday,\u201d the lab\u2019s current criticality safety chief and the lone NNSA expert assigned to that issue in the agency\u2019s Los Alamos oversight office warned in a private briefing for their colleagues at Sandia labs last month. Managers \u201cmust shield analysts from demands\u201d from production personnel, they said.<\/p>\n<p>Besides posing a serious health risk to those in PF-4, glove box releases of radioactive material each cost the government $23,000 to clean up, on average, the Los Alamos study said.<\/p>\n<h3>An acute shortage of criticality experts<\/h3>\n<p>Calculating exactly \u201chow much material can come together before there\u2019s an explosion\u201d \u2014 as the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman once put it \u2014 is a complex task. While visiting the production site for highly-enriched uranium in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during the 1940s, for example, Feynman was surprised to see stocks of that fissionable material deliberately stored in separate rooms, but on an adjoining wall that posed no barrier to collisions involving atoms of uranium and escaping neutrons on both sides. \u201cIt was very dangerous and they had not paid any attention to the safety at all,\u201d Feynman wrote years later.<\/p>\n<p>Plutonium work is so fraught with risk that the total mass of that metal allowed to be present in PF-4 is strictly limited. A decade ago, the limit was increased without an appropriate understanding of the risks, according to an NNSA technical bulletin in February. But with pieces of it strewn and stored throughout the normally busy building, partly because the vault is typically full, its managers have labored for years to systematically track down and remove excess stocks. They had some success last year, when they got rid of nearly a quarter of the plutonium on the building\u2019s \u201cmain floor,\u201d according to recent budget documents.<\/p>\n<p>Criticality specialists are employed not only to help set these overall mass limits but to guide technicians so they don\u2019t inadvertently trigger chain reactions in their daily work; those specialists are also supposed to be the first-responders when too much dangerous material is found in one place.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe weird thing about criticality safety is that it\u2019s not intuitive,\u201d Don Nichols, a former chief for defense nuclear safety at the NNSA, said in an interview. He cited an instance in which someone operating a stirring machine noticed that fissionable liquids were forming a \u201ccritical\u201d mass, so the operator shut the stirrer off, not immediately realizing that doing so made the problem worse. In other instances, analysts had judged a plutonium operation was safe, but then more workers \u2014 whose bodies reflect and slow neutrons \u2014 wound up being present nearby, creating unanticipated risks.<\/p>\n<p>Those doing the weapons disassemblies and invasive pit studies are typically under \u201ca big level pressure\u201d to complete a certain number every year, Nichols added. They are expected to do \u201cso many of these in this amount of time,\u201d to allow the labs to certify to the president that the stockpile is viable. Meanwhile, the calculations involved in avoiding criticality \u2014 which depend on the shape, size, form, quantity and geometric configuration of material being used in more than a dozen different industrial operations \u2014 are so complex that it takes a year and a half of training for an engineer to become qualified and as many as five years to become proficient, experts say.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s difficult to find people who want to do this job,\u201d particularly at the remote Los Alamos site, said McConnell, the NNSA safety chief. With plutonium use mostly confined to creating the world\u2019s most powerful explosives, \u201cthere are\u2026 very few public-sector opportunities for people to develop these skills,\u201d he added. As a result, he said, many NNSA sites lack the desired number of experts, which slows down production.<\/p>\n<p>At the time of the 2013 shutdown, after numerous internal warnings about the consequences of its mismanagement, Los Alamos had only \u201ca single junior qualified criticality safety engineer\u201d still in place, according to the February NNSA technical bulletin. Nichols, who was then the NNSA\u2019s associate administrator for safety and health, said McMillan didn\u2019t \u201crealize how serious it was until we took notice and helped him take notice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Without having adequate staff on hand to guide their operations safely, technicians at PF-4 were unable to carry out a scheduled destructive surveillance in 2014 of a refurbished plutonium pit meant for a warhead to be fit atop American submarine-launched ballistic missiles. It\u2019s been modernized at a cost of $946 million since 2014, with total expenses predicted to exceed $3.7 billion. Generally, up to 10 of the first pits produced for a new warhead type are set aside for surveillance to assure they\u2019re safely constructed and potent before they\u2019re deployed. But the planned disassembly was cancelled and the NNSA hasn\u2019t scheduled another yet, because of the shutdown.<\/p>\n<p>The lab also hasn\u2019t been able to complete planned invasive studies of the aging of plutonium used in a warhead for an aircraft-delivered nuclear bomb, now being modernized at an estimated cost of $7.4 billion to $10 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Former deputy NNSA director Madelyn Creedon told an industry conference in March that if new funds are given to the agency in President Trump\u2019s new budget, she knows where she\u2019d advise it be spent. \u201cOne of the things that doesn\u2019t take a huge amount of money but it\u2019s one that has been cut back over the last couple of years, is surveillance \u2014 enhanced surveillance\u201d of existing warheads, Creedon said.<\/p>\n<h3>The shortcomings persist<\/h3>\n<p>Los Alamos\u2019 progress in improving its criticality safety since the shutdown began has been fitful, and the dissonance between safety experts and its top managers has stubbornly persisted.<\/p>\n<p>McMillan initially promised to train fissile material handlers to be more heedful of plutonium-handling perils, for example, and to bring the inventory and safety documents guiding their work up to date. In an email to lab employees, he promised that a \u201cpause\u201d lasting less than a year wouldn\u2019t cause \u201cany significant impact to mission deliverables.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But at the end of 2013, a new group of safety experts, commissioned by the lab to guide its reforms, delivered bad news just as the lab was attempting to restart operations at PF-4. \u201cManagement has not yet fully embraced its commitment to criticality safety,\u201d the group said, according to a copy of its report obtained by CPI.<\/p>\n<p>It also listed nine weaknesses in the lab\u2019s safety culture that were rooted in a \u201cproduction focus\u201d to meet work deadlines. Workers say these deadlines are typically linked to financial bonuses. Los Alamos\u2019 leaders, the report said, had made the right promises, but failed to alter the underlying safety culture. \u201cThe focus appears to remain short-term and compliance oriented rather than based on a strategic plan,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n<p>In May 2014,\u00a0Peter Winokur, who at the time chaired the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, weighed in with a separate, written warning to the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. He said McMillan was improperly trying to restart \u201chigh-risk\u201d PF-4 operations without first carefully setting new, written, safety benchmarks for the lab\u2019s plutonium work.<\/p>\n<p>The NNSA head, Klotz, alerted the Secretary of Energy, Moniz, and the two of them flew to Los Alamos to meet with McMillan, a man known for both charm and hubris. \u201cLos Alamos is a legend,\u201d McMillan has boasted in a promotional video. \u201cIt\u2019s an icon. And of course, because of that, everybody notices what we do here; and we\u2019re held to a very high standard.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Moniz said he told McMillan personally that \u201cI was not entirely satisfied with the reactions of some of his senior managers.\u201d As a result, he said, \u201cactions were taken,\u201d without offering details.<\/p>\n<p>But progress was not swift.<\/p>\n<p>The NNSA, in its annual evaluation of Los Alamos&#8217; overall performance for fiscal year 2014, judged the criticality safety program to be \u201cbelow expectations\u201d with deficiencies \u201csimilar to issues identified in past\u201d evaluations; it particularly faulted the labels the lab had placed on nuclear materials and the guides the lab had prepared for workers performing plutonium handling chores.<\/p>\n<p>Some of these shortfalls persisted in 2015, and new ones were discovered. On May 6, 2015, for example, the NNSA sent Los Alamos\u2019 managing contractors a letter again criticizing the lab for being slow to fix criticality risks. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which summarized the letter in one of its weekly reports, said \u201cthere are currently more than 60 unresolved infractions,\u201d many present for months \u201cor even years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In January and again in April 2015, workers discovered tubes of liquids containing plutonium in seldom-used rooms at PF-4, with labels that made it hard to know how much plutonium they held or where they\u2019d come from, the safety board said. In May, workers packed a drum of nuclear waste with too much plutonium, posing a criticality risk, and in the ensuing probe, it became clear that they were relying on inaccurate and confusing documentation. Safety experts had miscalculated how much plutonium the drum could safely hold.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese issues are very similar to the issues that contributed to the LANL Director\u2019s decision to pause operations in June of 2013,\u201d safety board inspectors wrote.<\/p>\n<p>Asked about the persistence of the Los Alamos lab\u2019s problems, former NNSA director Miller smiled and said her colleagues at the nuclear oversight agency sometimes told the following joke: If Washington sent all three of America\u2019s nuclear weapons labs an order to study how to \u201cjump,\u201d they would all respond differently. Lawrence Livermore, she said, would convene a conference and produce a three-inch stack of reports about \u201cjumping.\u201d Officials at Sandia would simply jump.<\/p>\n<p>But at Los Alamos, she said, officials would instinctively respond with a \u201c**ck you, we\u2019re not jumping.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>New troubles last year<\/h3>\n<p>In 2016, for the third straight year, the Energy Department and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board each listed criticality safety at Los Alamos as one of the most pressing problems facing the nuclear weapons program, in their annual reports to Congress. Even now, \u201crequired improvements to the Criticality Safety program are moving at an unacceptably slow pace,\u201d the most recent NNSA performance evaluation of Los Alamos, released in Nov. 2016, said.<\/p>\n<p>Hazardous operations at PF-4 slowly started to resume during 2016, but problems continued. During a drill simulating a criticality accident on June, 15, 2016, some alarms at PF-4 didn\u2019t work, and workers showed \u201cinattentiveness\u201d to a colleague who pretended to be wounded,\u00a0according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board summary of the exercise; as a result, they were judged to have failed portions of the test.<\/p>\n<p>Then on June 21, 2016, after technicians working in a glove box spilled about 7 tablespoons of a liquid containing plutonium, workers violated safety rules by sopping up the spill with organic cheesecloth and throwing it in waste bins with other nuclear materials, according to an internal Los Alamos report.<\/p>\n<p>Using cheesecloth in such cleanups has been barred by the Energy Department since 1994, because its contact with plutonium readily triggers chemical reactions and fires. The prohibition was ignored to ill effect on Aug. 11, 2003, when two workers at PF-4 inhaled plutonium after a sudden reaction between that material, organic cheesecloth, and acid. A similar chemical reaction stemming from the sloppy disposal of Los Alamos\u2019 nuclear waste in 2014 provoked the shutdown of a deep-underground storage site in New Mexico for more than two years, a DOE accident investigation concluded. That incident cost the government more than a billion dollars in cleanup and other expenses.<\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, in 2016 the contractors that run Los Alamos \u2014 Bechtel National, Inc., AECOM, BWXT Government Group, Inc., and the University of California\u00a0\u2014 received 74 percent or $10.7 million of the $14.4 million in profits available to them from the NNSA in the category that includes pit production and surveillance (all their actual expenses are separately reimbursed every year by the government).<\/p>\n<p>In its November 2016 evaluation, which was informed in part by the contractors\u2019 assessment of their own performance, the NNSA explained the payout. \u201cThe Laboratory exceeded expectations\u201d in its progress toward being ready to fully resume activities in PF-4, the evaluation said. Spokesmen for the companies, as well as their joint consortium, declined comment.<\/p>\n<p>Marvin Adams, a nuclear physicist at Texas A&amp;M who has been a consultant to Los Alamos\u2019 work with warhead pits, said that \u201cIf they continue on their path to get everything back up and running, I am pretty comfortable.\u201d But he added that he would worry if a safety shutdown was again required. \u201cStarting and stopping in this business is a huge issue,\u201d Adams said. \u201cYou cannot fire these people and then go out on the street and hire them or replace them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But criticality experts remain worried.<\/p>\n<p>One of those who went to see Miller, the NNSA director, in 2011 to complain about criticality safety was Jerry McKamy, a former NNSA nuclear physicist who is now a senior expert at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but made clear in a trade journal article last December that the nuclear complex\u2019s poor handling of criticality safety has been endemic.<\/p>\n<p>Citing the safety history at Los Alamos and other facilities, McKamy wrote that \u201cDOE and its contractors have repeatedly shown they are not capable of anticipating and preventing serious criticality safety problems.\u201d They have persistently ignored \u201cwritten and credible warnings by criticality safety and management experts,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<p>Klotz, the NNSA director, has tried to be upbeat. In March, he told hundreds of nuclear contractors packed into a Washington hotel ballroom for an industry gathering that PF-4 was fully back in business, having \u201csafely resumed all plutonium activities there after a three-year pause.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He emphasized that Los Alamos had \u201cassembled a production development pit\u201d and said that work on a particular modernized warhead \u2014 due for delivery to the Navy in less than two years \u2014 provided proof of \u201cthe NNSA\u2019s ability and the ability of our M&amp;O partners\u201d \u2014 contractors \u2014 to deliver updated nuclear weapons \u201con time and on budget.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But a subsequent<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gao.gov\/assets\/690\/684310.pdf\">\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gao.gov\/assets\/690\/684310.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">analysis<\/a>\u00a0by the Government Accountability Office clashed with Klotz\u2019s description. In an April report on costs associated with the NNSA\u2019s ongoing nuclear weapon modernization campaign, the GAO disclosed the existence of an internal NNSA report forecasting that PF-4 will be unable to meet a congressional demand for production of 30 new pits per year by 2026, as part of a 30-year, $1 trillion nuclear weapons update. It said the pit production schedule is likely to slip two to three years.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cproduction development pit\u201d Klotz referenced during his March 1 speech and publicized in photos released by NNSA was actually made during a practice run, and so it could not be used in the arsenal, according to current and former government officials with access to classified information about the work.<\/p>\n<p>After Carter donned a protective moon-suit to witness the event, he issued a statement saying that \u201ca strong plutonium science and manufacturing capability is essential to the U.S. nuclear deterrent and cannot be underestimated.\u201d But he declined through a spokesman to say exactly what he was told by the lab during his visit about the status of the production effort.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, late last year, when Los Alamos conducted its first scheduled destructive test of a plutonium pit since the shutdown of PF-4 more than three years ago, it did not produce the needed results, according to NNSA\u2019s annual<a href=\"https:\/\/nnsa.energy.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/nnsa\/multiplefiles\/fy_2016_lans_fdo_memo_publicly_releasable_per.pdf\">\u00a0<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/nnsa.energy.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/nnsa\/multiplefiles\/fy_2016_lans_fdo_memo_publicly_releasable_per.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">evaluation<\/a>\u00a0of Los Alamos\u2019 performance last year. The test involved the core of a refurbished warhead scheduled to be delivered to the Navy by the end of 2019 for use atop the Trident missiles carried by U.S. submarines.<\/p>\n<p>It \u201cresulted in a \u2018no test\u2019 and loss of the test asset [pit] as a result of test set up issues,\u201d according to the NNSA report. Another destructive pit test scheduled for last year \u2014 after being delayed for at least a year \u2014 had to be abandoned outright because a nuclear safety analysis of the work wasn\u2019t completed, the NNSA\u2019s evaluation of the lab said.<\/p>\n<p>Other plutonium work at PF-4 also has not fully resumed. At a public hearing in Santa Fe on June 7, the head of NNSA\u2019s oversight office at Los Alamos said that federal permission in particular has not been granted for renewed work with plutonium liquids, which is needed to purify plutonium taken from older warheads for reuse, normally a routine practice.<\/p>\n<p>Safety official McConnell also told the hearing that while Los Alamos is making progress, it still has been unable to resolve the safety issue that provoked its shutdown four years ago, namely an acute shortage of engineers who are trained in how to keep the plutonium from becoming \u201ccritical\u201d and fissioning uncontrollably on its own because too much of it is concentrated in a particular space. \u201cThey\u2019re not where we need them yet,\u201d he said of the lab and its managers.<\/p>\n<p>McConnell also disclosed that NNSA is now quietly studying whether to keep plutonium pit operations at Los Alamos. Options being considered include upgrading the facilities there or \u201cadding capabilities or leveraging existing capabilities elsewhere in the country, at other sites where plutonium is already present or has been used.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Active NNSA sites that fit that description include the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Pantex plant in Texas and the Nevada National Security Site. The NNSA expects to complete its analysis by late summer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe lab has struggled to hire experienced engineers,\u201d the lab\u2019s criticality safety chief said in the presentation to colleagues at Sandia last month. \u201cWe recognize and acknowledge that we are on a multi-year journey to eliminate resource constraints and to become completely compliant with national standards.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A separate Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report in February detailed the magnitude of the shortfall:<\/p>\n<p>Los Alamos\u2019 dangerous work, it said, demands 27 fully qualified criticality safety engineers.<\/p>\n<p>The lab has 10.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A facility in New Mexico that handles the cores of U.S. nuclear weapons has been mostly closed since 2013 over its inability to control worker safety risks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":373102,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[119,1187,1179,116],"class_list":["post-373095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-energy-policy","tag-lanl","tag-los-alamos","tag-washington","series-nuclear-negligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}