NUCLEAR LABS’ RADIOACTIVE MAIL ENDANGERS PUBLIC
Though the materials were not ultimately lost, government 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 the packages were opened at their destinations, during scientific analysis after the items were removed from packaging, or — in the worst cases — after releases of radioactive contaminants by unwary recipients, the Center for Public Integrity’s investigation showed.
A few slight penalties have been imposed for these mistakes.
In the most recent such instance, Los Alamos National Laboratory — a privately run, government- owned nuclear weapons lab in NewMexico— admitted five weeks ago that in June, it had improperly shipped unstable, radioactive plutonium in three containers to two other government- owned labs via FedEx cargo planes, instead of complying
with federal regulations that required using trucks to limit the risk of an accident.
Los Alamos initially told the government that its decision stemmed from an urgent need for the plutonium at a federal lab in Livermore, Calif. “There was no urgency in receiving this shipment — this notion is incorrect,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory spokeswoman Lynda Seaver said in an email.
The incident — which came to light after revelations by the Center for Public Integrity about other safety lapses at Los Alamos— drew swift condemnation by officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington. It provoked the Energy Department on June 23 to order a three- week halt to all shipments out of Los Alamos, the largest of the nuclear weapons labs and a linchpin in the complex of privately run facilities that sustains the U. S. nuclear arsenal.
“All of those involved from the individual contributor level up the management chain have been held accountable through actions that include terminations, suspensions, and compensation consequences,” Los Alamos spokesman Matthew Nerzig said.
The documents show that Los Alamos has been a repeat offender in mislabeling its shipments of hazardous materials: In 2012, it sent unlabeled plutonium — a highly carcinogenic, unstable metal — to a University of New Mexico laboratory where graduate students work, according to internal government reports. The plutonium was accidentally opened, leading to a contamination of the lab that required cleaning by the university and disposal of the debris by Los Alamos.
Eleven of the 25 known shipping mistakes since July 2012 involved shipments that either originated at Los Alamos or passed through the lab.
Thirteen of the 25 incidents involved plutonium, highly enriched uranium ( another nuclear explosive) or other radioactivematerials.
Some of the mislabeled shipments went to toxic waste dumps and breached regulatory limits on what the dumps were al-
lowed to accept, according to the reports.
Patricia Klinger, a spokeswoman for DOT hazardous materials regulators, said that ensuring all shipments are labeled accurately 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. She did not respond to questions about why the department only rarely imposed fines.
Internal NNSA records indicate that in the 25 incidents since July 2012, contractors drew three fines. In more than 20 instances, the contractors were not directly fined by regulators in enforcement actions stemming from the shipping errors.
Nerzig declined to comment about the shipment of unlabeled plutonium to the University of New Mexico’s nuclear engineering program.
According to records obtained under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act, the university expected to receive “dummy” metal sheets without radioactivity that faculty used to test radiation detectors Los Alamos commissioned the university to develop.
When the waste was shipped out, the university’s chief radiation safety officer told members of the campus safety staff in an email that the disposal was “very difficult … due to the high radio- toxicity of the radionuclide.”