Alarmed by the safety implications of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, experts in the U.S. are turning their attention to domestic nuclear issues, including an earthquake-related controversy at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Everet Beckner, a Santa Fe resident and formerly a high-ranking official in the National Nuclear Security Administration during the Bush administration, called Friday for a pause in the design work underway on major nuclear weapons facilities, including the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) facility, a multibillion-dollar project in design at LANL.

A deputy administrator for defense programs from 2002-2005, Beckner told a leading trade publication, the Nuclear Weapons and Materials Monitor, that a pause now to incorporate lessons learned from the catastrophic safety failures at Fukushima would probably be a good idea.

"There comes a point where you have to say the earthquake event in Japan was outside the current window of expectations because it was larger than a thousand-year event," he said in a telephone interview Friday. "Maybe that isn't enough of a margin."

On Friday, President Barack Obama asked the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review the safety of American nuclear power plants.

But officials at the nuclear weapons agency said their situation is different. NNSA has authority over facilities where large amounts of radioactive materials are stored for use in maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, and their new weapons facilities have an ongoing design process that they believe will be responsive to new information.

"CMRR-NF (the proposed nuclear facility at LANL) and UPF (the Uranium Processing Facility in Tennessee) are vastly different than a nuclear reactor. One is essentially a nonindustrial chemistry lab which works with nuclear materials, and the other a uranium manufacturing facility," NNSA officials responded in a prepared statement. "That said, the latest seismic and structural design codes and standards are being incorporated into both facilities. CMRR-NF and UPF are being designed with the utmost emphasis on robust and layered safety systems."

The CMRR-NF is currently undergoing an environmental review, necessitated in part by significant changes to the scope of the building to meet emerging risk factors having to do with possible earthquakes.

"The most recent increase in seismic hazard came in 2007," said Tom Whitacre, of the design team at a recent public meeting in Los Alamos, before the incident in Japan. He said the increases, including the potential for more active ground motion, triggered a process for evaluating all the facilities and recommending changes, if needed.

The project is also facing a lawsuit, challenging the adequacy of the environmental review even before the current crisis.

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Group, which is the plaintiff in that case, said he understands that the Department of Energy is studying the situation but his experience has been that "they aren't revealing specific information about the project that would be useful to anyone interested in its safety."

At Los Alamos National Laboratory, nuclear safety issues have been complicated with seismic concerns, as geological studies have uncovered an increasingly precarious underground structure.

Beginning in 1972, LANL made efforts to understand the seismic hazards on site. By 1987, LANL scientists were estimating that characteristic large earthquakes from on-site faults could range from Richter magnitude 6.5 up to as much as 7.8.

In the mid-1990s, LANL was chosen to be the national center for plutonium processing and manufacturing, using the lower, more optimistic end of this range.

As faults were mapped in more detail in the late 1990s — and found to run near and even beneath some LANL nuclear facilities — concern as to the possible magnitude and frequency of LANL earthquakes increased. A survey found a number of LANL buildings to be at considerable risk of earthquake-induced collapse.

The evolving scientific understanding of seismicity at LANL was not immediately applied to building siting and design and was not immediately translated into engineering terms. Then in 2007, NNSA issued a new detailed assessment of seismic hazard that was found to be considerably greater than the optimistic 1995 figures.

"When they set up Los Alamos initially, they didn't care about these things. They were looking for an isolated site," said Mello, who has studied seismic issues at the lab since 1996.

"Since then, many people have questioned the wisdom of putting a plutonium processing facility and now a nuclear pit manufacturing facility on the side of a volcano," he said.

In its 2011 report to Congress, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, responsible for safety oversight of the nuclear weapons complex, addressed adequate seismic safety precautions in the plutonium facility, adjacent to the proposed nuclear facility — one of its most recent disagreements with Los Alamos.

Having thought they mutually worked out a satisfactory solution to a particular set of earthquake concerns, the safety board then found the laboratory and its managers proceeding in a direction that had not been agreed upon.

"It is not always true that DOE's managers will ensure safety by imposing conditions of approval that address inadequacies in the safety basis," the safety board reported.

"There are tremendous pressures never to let anything get in the way," Beckner said. "I don't think nuclear operations have to cease, and I don't think that will be the conclusion."

But he does believe extraordinary circumstances justify another look at plans for the nuclear facility at LANL and that it should take into account exceptional possibilities, like those that have created such a dangerous situation in Japan.

Beckner said the accident scenarios should be revisited to include, for example, the possibility of a full fire in the vault at the CMRR nuclear facility, where 6 metric tons of plutonium will be stored.

"Then, if you estimate the potential radiological exposure to the public at the boundary will be higher than you can tolerate, reduce the material at risk," he said.

"I think they owe it to the public. If they don't do it, they're going to get lawsuits."