LANL suspends some nuclear work
Storage-area safety concerns prompt precautionary move
10/9/2007
The lab stopped some operations Sept. 21 and resumed some of them Sept. 27, said Kevin Roark, spokesman for the lab.
Roark said he did not know when operations would be back to regular levels.
There was no accident or danger of an accident, Roark said, but officials took the action as a precautionary measure. "This is the lab's climate of safety," he said.
The issue concerns whether there is adequate radiation shielding inside storage areas to prevent a nuclear chain reaction from occurring accidentally in fissile material, such as enriched plutonium. The radiation emitted in a criticality accident or excursion can cause serious injury or death.
Controlled criticality takes place inside reactor cores.
"You just don't want to have it happen by accident," Roark said. "That's what's really bad."
The likelihood that a "perfect storm" of problems would happen is extremely remote, Roark said, but lab officials want to prepare for it anyway.
Los Alamos was the first lab to study criticality safety, Roark said.
The last fatal criticality accident to take place there was on New Year's Eve of 1958, Roark said. One person died.
Also, in 1945, a Los Alamos scientist suffered fatal radiation poisoning while stacking blocks of tamper material around a mass of fissionable material. And in 1946, senior scientist Louis Slotin irradiated himself during a similar experiment. His quick action saved the lives of other scientists in the room, but he died of radiation poisoning nine days later.
"We are not ever going to have another criticality accident here if we can help it," Roark said.
U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said in a statement that the lab has taken steps to ensure that plutonium operations are handled as safely as possible.
"A routine review of safety-related analyses for a plutonium storage area suggested that the safety margins may be smaller than previously thought," Domenici explained. "As a precaution, a decision to suspend certain material movements was made pending a more thorough analysis."
Domenici also noted the action has had minimal impact on the facility. "As I understand it, there has not been any accident or similar triggering event. No one has been harmed. Indeed, this action was taken to ensure higher levels of safety in the future," Domenici said.
News of the work halt emerged after the Los Alamos Study Group, an Albuquerque-based watchdog group, sent out a news release Tuesday morning. The group based the release on the reporting of Jim Williams of radio station KUNM, but lab officials had not yet confirmed the shutdown.
Greg Mello, head of the Los Alamos Study Group, said lab officials did the right thing by suspending some plutonium operations. He added, however, "I would prefer that they just stay shut."
Mello said he believes the lab would be safer if the National Nuclear Safety Administration and the country's executive branch stopped leaving everything to the lab's contractors to work out.
"They have a lot of homework to do, and instead of kicking the safety compliance issues down the road, they should focus on them," Mello said.
Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said safety and security problems are not going away at the lab so Northern New Mexicans should be leery about increasing the number of nuclear-bomb pits or triggers produced at the lab.
Coghlan said he and many other people believe the lab is heading in the direction of becoming a pit-production center.
Contact Wendy Brown at 986-3072 or wbrown@sfnewmexican.com.