One of the recently disclosed improper shipments of nuclear material from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico involved 100 grams of plutonium sent to a sister site in California, according to an incident report posted Monday.
The Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration said Friday that Los Alamos had during the previous week sent small amounts of an unidentified special nuclear material via air cargo to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina. Federal regulations prohibit shipping such material by air.
The agency at the time did not cite the specific type and amount of material involved in the shipments, or how it is used at the labs. The incident is under investigation.
In the daily update to its Occurrence Reporting and Processing System (ORPS), DOE said Monday that a LANL materials management shipper on June 16 “inadvertently shipped 100 grams of plutonium in a 9975 type B package via Fedex air freight to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).” Livermore officials alerted the packaging and transportation operations manager at Los Alamos the following Wednesday, after which the LANL official sent notifications to DOE personnel at the lab and headquarters.
“The shipment was received at LLNL with no impact to the material, personnel or the environment,” the ORPS update says.
It was not immediately clear whether FedEx had been alerted to the situation, according to the latest report. LANL’s packaging and transportation operations manager will prepare a report for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
It was not immediately clear whether there was a corresponding ORPS report for the shipment to the Savannah River National Laboratory. The NNSA said Monday it would have no additional comment on the matter beyond the statement issued last week.
This was the latest in a series of operational problems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was the point of origin of a waste container that burst open at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant farther south in New Mexico, closing the facility for nearly three years.
