USA TODAY International Edition
Workers risk lives as others profit
Private operators of nuke weapons labs make millions even when safety suffers
A wrong turn of a valve at one of the country’s nuclear weapons laboratories unleashed an explosion that easily could have killed two workers.
The near catastrophe in August 2011 at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque lifted the roof of the building, separated a wall and bent an exterior door 30 feet away. One worker was knocked to the floor; another narrowly missed getting hit with flying debris as a fire erupted.
As the Department of Energy investigated over the next three years, the same lab — one of 10 nuclear weapons- related sites that contain radioactive materials in addition to the usual hazards found in industrial settings — had two more serious accidents, both blamed on insufficient safety protocols.
But when the time came for regulators to take action against the company in charge of the lab, officials decided against a financial penalty. They waived a $ 412,500 fine they had initially proposed, saying Sandia Corp., a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, had made “significant and positive steps … to improve Sandia’s safety culture.”
This wasn’t a rare outcome. Energy Department documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity make clear that the nation’s eight nuclear weapons labs and plants and two sites that support them remain dangerous places to work, but their corporate managers often face relatively slight penalties after accidents.
Workers have inhaled radioactive particles that pose lifetime cancer threats. Others received electrical shocks or were burned by acid or in fires. They have been splashed with toxic chemicals and cut by debris from exploding metal drums.
Energy Department reports blame an array of causes, including production pressures, incorrect work procedures, poor communication, inadequate training, insufficient supervision and inattention to risk.
But the private companies the government pays to run the facilities rarely suffer serious financial penalties, even when regulators conclude the companies committed mistakes or paid inadequate attention to safety. Low fines leave taxpayers to finance most of the cleanup and repair of contaminated sites after accidents that officials said never should have happened.
During a yearlong investigation built on a review of thousands of pages of records and interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and contractor employees, the Center for Public Integrity found: Private firms running laboratories and plants each are paid $ 40,000 to $ 160,000 a day in profits alone, a total of more than $ 2 billion in the past 10 years. But during that period, the Energy Department’s enforcement arm waived or significantly reduced 19 of 21 major fines officials had said were justified because of safety lapses and other workplace misconduct. All told, they forgave $ 3.3 million of $ 7.3 million they said could have been imposed. One reason fines are reduced is federal rules governing Energy Department contractors do not allow the contractors to be fined if their profits were docked for the same infraction. The department argues that this arrangement is still effective. But a review of payments to 10 contractors over a decade shows they earned on average 86% of their maximum potential profits, even though that decade was marked with persistent safety lapses. When the Energy Department penalized a contractor that shut down the nation’s underground nuclear waste dump in 2014 after an accident that exposed 21 people to radioactive carcinogens, it amounted to a tiny share of the government’s repair costs. Los Alamos National Laboratory, operated by a consortium of four contractors called Los Alamos National Security LLC, was fined $ 57 million. The government’s cleanup bill? About $ 1.5 billion.
The frequency of serious accidents and incidents at these facilities has not diminished — as it has at most other industrial workplaces in America — and may have risen significantly. The number of violation notices, let- ters, and consent orders sent to contractors after accidents and mishaps has more than doubled since 2013.
Many contractors penalized for malfeasance later committed new infractions, federal records show. Some workplace safety experts suggest contractors are building fines and penalties into their business plans.
The private firms the government pays to run its nuclear weapons program employ about 40,000 people from coast to coast. Scientists and other workers often come face to face with toxic chemicals, radioactive materials, nuclear wastes and other dangers as they maintain the planet’s largest atomic arsenal.
They risk immediate peril from explosions and fires, and lurking threats from the cancercausing agents they handle that could slowly erode their health over many years.
“What’s the incentive to do the job right when no matter what you get the money?” asks Ralph Stanton, a worker who inhaled radioactive plutonium in an accident at Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls.
Rooting out details of safety in- cidents from Energy Department reports — many of which are based on contractors’ self- reporting — is difficult.
Injured workers are not identified, and those who have sued the contractors for safety lapses often are offered settlements in exchange for confidentiality. Many declined the Center for Public Integrity’s requests for interviews.
James McConnell, the top safety official at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons production, did not dispute that the data showed a notable rise in serious accidents since 2013.
But “safety is an inherent part of everything we do,” he said. “Every one of our employees has the right to go home as healthy as they were when they showed up at work.”
Annual profits for the contractors that run nuclear weapons- related sites range from $ 15 million to $ 60 million for each company.
But the nuclear weapons work is commonly viewed as “extremely low- risk” financially, as a top National Nuclear Security Administration official said in an email to Sandia executives in October 2009.
Contractors commit “virtually no financial investment” because they have relatively few expenditures the federal government won’t reimburse, the official noted. To get in trouble takes “a complete screw- up/ bad faith.”
The government can, but rarely does, terminate contracts for poor performance. Most firms have been able to count on a decade or more of steady income once they win a contract.
The contract experience of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 30 miles east of San Francisco, illustrates how the government’s leverage is sometimes ignored.
Livermore, where warheads are designed and related work is performed, experienced a series of problems in 2012. Its contractor consortium, called Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC, includes public companies Babcock and Wilcox and URS Corp., now a subsidiary of AECOM engineering; private companies Bechtel National and Battelle; and the University of California.
An effort to create fusion by bombarding hydrogen with highpowered lasers failed to deliver. The lab mismanaged money on another project and experienced several electrical safety incidents, according to government reports.
So it received only 78% of the profit available to it for good performance, 2 points below the minimum needed to get an additional year automatically tacked onto its contract. It also got $ 20.8 million in additional, fixed profit.
But the National Nuclear Security Administration’s then- deputy administrator, Neile Miller, gave the lab an extra $ 541,527, pushing the performance profit over the 80% threshold to get the extra year. Total profit wound up being 88% of the maximum possible.
At a congressional hearing in April 2013, Miller told lawmakers critical of the decision that she did so to support efforts from the lab’s new director to improve performance as a “one- time pass.”
Livermore “takes its safety and security very seriously,” and the lab’s safety record has been improving, said Greg Wolf, National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman. “Employees go through extensive training, and work undergoes rigorous analysis to ensure protective measures are in place.”