The former management contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico received a slap on the wrist from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) over a 2017 incident in which personnel entered a low-oxygen environment in violation of federal workplace safety laws.
No one was hurt in the Sept. 13, 2017, incident, in which an unspecified number of employees in the Physics Building in Los Alamos’ Technical Area 3 entered “a room while low oxygen alarms were activating.”
That is according to a preliminary notice of violation to Los Alamos National Security (LANS) Vice President Richard Kacich from NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty. The notice was dated Dec. 20 and published online on Jan. 3.
The NNSA could have punished LANS with a civil penalty of about $140,000 for the violation, but opted not to, according to the note. The agency said the incident already factored into LANS’ performance evaluation for fiscal 2017, when the company earned about $6 million, or roughly 70 percent of the small portion of its annual fee that may be reduced at the NNSA’s discretion. Los Alamos National Security, which still exists in the legal sense, must reply to the preliminary notice by Jan. 30, or it will become final.
Los Alamos National Security was a partnership of the University of California and Bechtel, with industry junior partners AECOM and BWX Technologies. The company Los Alamos from 2006 until Oct. 31, 2018, after which it turned over the keys to Triad National Security: a partnership of the University of California, Battelle Memorial Institute ,and Texas A&M University.
Triad took on nearly all of Los Alamos National Security’s full-time employees after the transition.
“While it is now clear that no employees were in imminent danger due to the low-oxygen alarm event at building 40, it is also clear that well-established procedures and practices for responding to a low-oxygen alarm were not fully followed,” a lab spokesperson said by email Monday. “We need to do better and we will. In the interests of their own safety, we have reminded our workers to keep safety uppermost in their minds at all times.”
The Cold War-era Physics Building houses, among other things, some of the lab’s space sciences programs. The facility affected by low oxygen levels houses liquid nitrogen for cryogenics equipment.
