Chronic lapses in safety procedures at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico may have led to a
radiation leak that has forced a prolonged shutdown across the
state of the only permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository,
federal inspectors said on Wednesday.
The inspectors, in a sharply critical report, sought to
explain how a barrel of plutonium-tainted debris from the
nuclear weapons lab near Santa Fe ended up improperly packaged
before it was shipped off for burial 300 miles away at the Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant.
The leak of radiation, a small amount of which escaped to
the surface and contaminated 22 workers at the plant, ranks as
the facility's worst mishap since it opened in 1999.
Previous findings by government regulators suggest the waste
drum contained a volatile mix of nitrate salts and organic
matter that ruptured the barrel after it was placed in a vault
half a mile underground at the plant.
Such a mix was shown to be "inherently hazardous" in a 2000
study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But flawed
procedures at Los Alamos fostered a culture "that permitted the
introduction of potentially incompatible materials" in waste
drums there, according to the report by the U.S. Energy
Department's Office of Inspector General.
The lab's "waste processing and safety-related control
procedures should have prevented the addition of these
potentially incompatible materials. However, the process failed
in this matter," federal inspectors said in the report.
Energy Department officials and their contractors, charged
with ensuring that nuclear waste processed at Los Alamos could
be safely disposed of at the Carlsbad facility, failed to heed a
2012 technical paper advising that waste drums containing
nitrate salts be treated with an absorbent such as kitty litter
composed of inorganic solids and instead used organic kitty
litter, according to the report.
In a written response to the report, the Energy Department's
nuclear security managers said processing at Los Alamos of
so-called transuranic waste was suspended in May for safety
reasons. Managers said they also imposed "additional
precautionary protection measures to ensure our workers, the
public and the environment are protected."
The report led Don Hancock, head of the watchdog group
called the Southwest Research and Information Center, to demand
the government hire new contractors to manage the lab and the
waste dump and for tougher regulation at both facilities.
"All of those entities made mistakes," he said.
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