Chronic lapses in safety procedures at theLos Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico may have led to aradiation leak that has forced a prolonged shutdown across thestate of the only permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository,federal inspectors said on Wednesday.The inspectors, in a sharply critical report, sought toexplain how a barrel of plutonium-tainted debris from thenuclear weapons lab near Santa Fe ended up improperly packagedbefore it was shipped off for burial 300 miles away at the WasteIsolation Pilot Plant.The leak of radiation, a small amount of which escaped tothe surface and contaminated 22 workers at the plant, ranks asthe facility's worst mishap since it opened in 1999.Previous findings by government regulators suggest the wastedrum contained a volatile mix of nitrate salts and organicmatter that ruptured the barrel after it was placed in a vaulthalf a mile underground at the plant.Such a mix was shown to be "inherently hazardous" in a 2000study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But flawedprocedures at Los Alamos fostered a culture "that permitted theintroduction of potentially incompatible materials" in wastedrums there, according to the report by the U.S. EnergyDepartment's Office of Inspector General.The lab's "waste processing and safety-related controlprocedures should have prevented the addition of thesepotentially incompatible materials. However, the process failedin this matter," federal inspectors said in the report.Energy Department officials and their contractors, chargedwith ensuring that nuclear waste processed at Los Alamos couldbe safely disposed of at the Carlsbad facility, failed to heed a2012 technical paper advising that waste drums containingnitrate salts be treated with an absorbent such as kitty littercomposed of inorganic solids and instead used organic kittylitter, according to the report.In a written response to the report, the Energy Department'snuclear security managers said processing at Los Alamos ofso-called transuranic waste was suspended in May for safetyreasons. Managers said they also imposed "additionalprecautionary protection measures to ensure our workers, thepublic and the environment are protected."The report led Don Hancock, head of the watchdog groupcalled the Southwest Research and Information Center, to demandthe government hire new contractors to manage the lab and thewaste dump and for tougher regulation at both facilities."All of those entities made mistakes," he said.

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