Workers responsible for a breach of criticality safety procedures at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are back on the job, the lab’s prime contractor confirmed this week.
The workers had been temporarily “disqualified” from working at Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility after moving a shell — part of a nuclear-weapon core — into an area of the facility that already contained plutonium. Lab rules intended to avoid an uncontrolled nuclear chain-reaction prohibit placing shells and plutonium too close together.
The August mishap only came to light in September after the federal government’s independent defense-nuclear safety watchdog, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, reported the incident on its website.
On Thursday, a spokesperson for lab prime contractor Los Alamos National Security (LANS) confirmed the workers had completed retraining and were back on the job at the Plutonium Facility. It was not clear, and the lab spokesperson would not quantify, how many workers were involved with the incident.
A spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) declined to say Thursday whether the quasi-independent Department of Energy agency had disciplined anyone involved with or responsible for the criticality safety breach.
Instead, the spokesperson pointed to a statement published Tuesday, in which the stockpile steward said “[t]he laboratory has since taken steps to help prevent a similar event in the future.” The agency’s statement also stressed that “[a]t no time was there any risk of an inadvertent criticality [or] of injury or exposure to the workforce or public.”
Criticality accidents, involving an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, can be lethal. There have been several such incidents at Los Alamos over its decades of operation, some resulting in deaths.
While a series of nuclear-safety accidents have driven an exodus of qualified nuclear workers from the lab, those involved with the latest breach of protocol apparently were not among them.
“[T]his casting operation had recently completed a federal readiness review and is one of the few operations where the crew that underwent readiness has not experienced personnel turnover,” the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board noted in the Sept. 1 report that disclosed the August violation.
Casting refers to creating a specially shaped piece of plutonium in a mold. Plutonium components of weapon pits can also be machined into shape.
Word of the latest Los Alamos mishap surfaced with the NNSA about to begin competition for the follow-on to the 2006 $2 billion per year management and operations contract that expires on Sept. 30, 2018. Reports of the criticality safety breach sent University of California, the senior partner on LANS, on a brief detour into public-relations damage control even as it gears up to bid on the follow-on contract.
Competition for the next management and operations pact, envisioned in DOE’s draft solicitation from July as a 10-year deal with a five-year base and a five-year option, was supposed to begin in September. October now seems more likely, based on previous public pronouncements from retiring lab Director Charles McMillan.
An NNSA spokesperson did not reply to questions about the contract Thursday.
Also hanging over the current LANS partners — which include lead industry partner Bechtel National and corporate teammates AECOM and BWX Technologies — are a string of nuclear snafus that made headlines throughout the weapons complex and beyond.
In June, Los Alamos air-mailed plutonium to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that was supposed to be sent by ground. In 2014, a drum of plutonium-contaminated waste from Los Alamos burst open and released radiation into the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The 2014 accident was in a way the last straw for DOE, which announced afterward it would not pick up additional options on LANS’ prime contract.
A University of California regent said in September the school would seek a different set of industry partners to bid on the follow-on.
