While the materials were not ultimately lost, the documents reveal repeated instances in which hazardous substances vital to making nuclear bombs and their components were mislabeled before shipment. That means those transporting and receiving them were not warned of the safety risks and did not take required precautions to protect themselves or the public, the reports say.
The risks were discovered after regulators conducted inspections during transit, when packages were opened at their destinations, during scientific analysis after items were removed from packaging, or, in the worst case, after of unsuspecting recipients releasing radioactive contaminants, the Center for Public Integrity Research showed.
It appears that only a few light penalties have been imposed for these errors.
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In the most recent case, Los Alamos National Laboratory, a government-owned and privately-run nuclear weapons laboratory about 50 miles northeast of Albuquerque, admitted five weeks ago that it had improperly shipped radioactive plutonium in June unstable in three containers to two other government-owned labs via fedex cargo planes instead of complying with federal regulations that required the use of trucks to limit the risk of an accident.
Los Alamos initially told the government that his decision was due to an urgent need for plutonium at a federal laboratory in livermore, california.
But “there was no urgency in receiving this shipment. This notion is incorrect,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s spokeswoman, Lynda Seaver, said in an email message.
The incident, which came to light after a series of revelations by the Center for Public Integrity about other security lapses at the Alamos, drew swift condemnation from officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington. It also prompted the Department of Energy to order a three-week suspension beginning June 23 of all shipments from Los Alamos, the world’s largest nuclear weapons laboratory and a key player in the complex of private facilities that supports the United States’ nuclear arsenal. united states.
“Everyone involved from the individual taxpayer level to the management chain level has been held accountable through actions that include terminations, suspensions and compensation consequences,” Los Alamos spokesman Matthew Nerzig said.
Documents show that Los Alamos, in particular, has been a repeat offender by mislabeling its shipments of hazardous materials: for example, in a previously undisclosed case from 2012, it shipped unlabeled plutonium, an unstable metal and highly carcinogenic, to a New Mexico university laboratory where graduate students sometimes work, according to internal government reports.
plutonium was accidentally broken open there, leading to contamination of the lab that the university had to clean up and poplar trees to get rid of the debris.
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In total, 11 of the 25 known shipping errors since July 2012 involved shipments that originated at Los Alamos or passed through the lab. thirteen of the 25 incidents involved plutonium; highly enriched uranium, which is another nuclear explosive; or other radioactive materials.
Some of the mislabeled shipments went to toxic waste landfills and violated regulatory limits on what landfills could accept, according to reports.
Ensuring that all shipments are accurately labelled is vital to emergency personnel, whose safety and ability to protect the public in the event of an accident rely on correct knowledge of whatever they’re trying to clean up or contain, said Patricia Klinger, a spokeswoman for U.S. Department of Transportation hazardous materials regulators. She did not respond to questions about why the department only rarely appears to have imposed fines.
Internal NSA records indicate that in the 25 incidents since July 2012, contractors received three fines. in more than 20 cases, regulators did not directly fine contractors in enforcement actions stemming from shipping errors.
nerzig declined to comment on shipping unlabeled plutonium to the nuclear engineering program at the university of new mexico.
The university expected to receive “dummy” non-radioactive metal sheets that professors used to test radiation detectors, according to records obtained under the state’s public records inspection law. los alamos had commissioned the university to develop the team.
When one of the samples crumpled during handling, it released radioactive particles that contaminated the room that housed the detector, but no one was injured, according to Los Alamos’ report to the Department of Energy. the lab was cleaned up in a few days, but debris removal and recovery took over a year.
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When the waste was shipped, the university’s radiation safety director at the time told campus security staff members in an email that disposal was “very difficult… due to high radiotoxicity of the radionuclide”.
In the past three months alone, nuclear weapons contractors have made at least three shipping errors, in addition to errant shipments of fedex plutonium, according to energy department records.
• In June, the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas, accidentally shipped an unsafe quantity of high explosives to an unspecified outside laboratory.
• In May, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., shipped unlabeled radioactive materials to an unspecified destination.
• Also in May, Los Alamos sent mislabeled highly acidic waste to a chemical landfill in Colorado, according to records from the New Mexico Department of the Environment.
In December, Savannah River Transportation personnel sent a container of tritium gas, used to increase the power of a nuclear detonation, to the wrong place. It was supposed to be shipped to Lawrence Livermore, but instead it was delivered to Watermelon National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
in september 2014, contractors operating the nevada national security site inadvertently shipped unlabeled radioactive material to their own satellite office in livermore, which lacked a trained radiation control expert to deal with such a surprise, according to an internal report from the department of energy.
the center for public integrity is a nonprofit investigative news organization in washington, d.c. follow patrick malone on twitter: @pmalonedc and @publici
