The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico mistakenly transported nuclear material to two other national laboratories by air instead of by ground, the Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration said late Friday.
While the material was prepared for transport by commercial ground cargo, as was proper, shipment documents indicated it should be flown by air cargo, the NNSA said in a press release. That means of shipment is not authorized under federal rules, but the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina both in the prior week received “small quantities” of special nuclear material via air cargo.
The NNSA did not identifty the specific type of nuclear material involved in the incident. The 1954 Atomic Energy Act cites special designates special nuclear material as plutonium, uranium-233, or uranium enriched in the isotopes uranium-233 or uranium-235.
“This failure to follow established procedures is absolutely unacceptable,” said NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz in the release.
No radioactive material was lost in the shipments, and there was no contamination of the environment, the NNSA said.
The agency is investigating the route cause of the accident, though it did not say how long the investigation would take.
Los Alamos National Security (LANS), a partnership of Bechtel National, BWX Technologies, AECOM, and the University of California., is DOE’s prime contractor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
LANS is already set to lose its Los Alamos management contract, at the end of fiscal 2018, in part because of the company’s role in the 2014 accidents that closed DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for nearly three years. A LANS subcontractor improperly packaged a shipment of transuranic waste that was buried at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, causing the shipment to combust underground and leak radiation into the facility.
“Upon completion of the investigation, NNSA will use the full terms and conditions of the contract to ensure that any responsible parties are held accountable,” the agency said in Friday’s presser.
