Three workers and two rooms were radioactively contaminated after a botched maintenance job on a glove box at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility, the Department of Energy and Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said.
It was the latest in a series of safety snafus at Los Alamos to come to light during DOE’s search for a new lab manager, which formally began Oct. 18 when the agency issued a final request for proposals for a 10-year contract.
So far, there is no sign the workers suffered any internal rad contamination, lab prime contractor Los Alamos National Security said in a statement Monday. The company, led by University of California and Bechtel National, manages Los Alamos for the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The workers are now back on the job, though the glovebox maintenance that led to the lab’s latest rad scare is not finished yet, according to a lab spokesperson.
“The employees have been returned to work,” the spokesperson wrote Monday. “The interrupted work activity will resume once the area is fully decontaminated.”
Besides the workers, the radiation spread contaminated the air and floors of rooms 105 and 106 at the Plutonium Facility, plus a hallway in the building.
This was the second contamination incident reported in September involving these workers and this glove box. Radiation leaked Sept. 23 after two workers installing new parts for a glove box — a sealed chamber where properly shielded technicians can handle fissile material — removed a plug from the bottom of the box, according to a report released late last week by the DNFSB.
The workers were accompanied by a radiation control technician, according to the DNFSB. The three exited the room after sensor arrays called continuous air monitors detected radiation in excess of legal levels and tripped an automatic alarm.
The three workers all had contamination on their protective suits. One hundred thousand disintegrations per minute of alpha radiation were detected on the skin of one worker’s chest and neck, according to DNFSB and Energy Department reports about the incident. According to the reports, personnel on site decontaminated the workers, and performed nasal swipes on them to test for internal contamination. The swipes revealed non-detectable activity — a sign the workers may not have been contaminated internally.
After the accident, the workers received special bioassays: more thorough checks for internal contamination. The results of these tests will not be known at least until November.
“Final bioassay results typically take two months or more,” the Los Alamos National Security spokesperson said.
The workers involved in the Sept. 23 mishap also contributed to a contamination spread at the Plutonium Facility in late August, the DNFSB said. The August contamination was traced to the same glove box the workers were dispatched to repair last month.
