USA TODAY International Edition
Building sites for weapons encounter safety questions
The Department of Energy is scheduled to decide within days where plutonium parts for the next generation of nuclear weapons are to be made, but internal government reports indicate serious and persistent safety concerns plague the two candidate sites.
Some experts are worried about the safety records of either choice: Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where plutonium parts have historically been assembled, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where other nuclear materials for America’s bombs have been made since in the 1950s.
An announcement by the Trump administration about the location is expected by May 11 in preparation for the ramped-up production of nuclear warheads called for by the Defense Department’s recent review of America’s nuclear weapons policy.
Internal government reports obtained by the Center for Public Integrity have warned that workers at the plants have been handling nuclear materials sloppily or have failed to monitor safety aggressively.
Personnel at Savannah River, for example, came dangerously close to a lethal nuclear accident in January 2015 when the stirring mechanism for a tank that held plutonium solution failed. Flecks of plutonium sank to the bottom of the tank, close enough for their neutrons to interact in a way that threatened to kick off a chain reaction — known as a criticality — that could have killed everyone in the room and spread radioactivity.
Since then, the site’s nuclear materials operations have been conducted under special oversight by the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department component that produces warheads for the military.
A group of senior Energy Department engineers and physicists concluded in a report in March, however, that while the unusual arrangement has brought some improvements, it hasn’t fixed key problems. At Los Alamos, plutonium handling errors forced at least three work stoppages in March alone, including one halting all work associated with plutonium pits, after many similar stoppages in recent years, according to reports by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal oversight agency in Washington.
Although the Energy Department said the site is making progress, plutonium handlers at the lab confused the terms “staging” and “storage” twice in recent weeks, leading to plutonium being placed in areas and containers where it was prohibited and unsafe, according to the independent safety board reports.
An Energy Department spokeswoman said the Savannah River’s safety program was overall “found to be healthy and functioning well” even if it needed improvements in “supporting programs such as training and qualification and hazard assessment.”
The Center for Public Integrity is a non-profit, non-partisan investigative newsroom in Washington, D.C. For more of its national security reporting visit https://www.publicintegrity.org /national-security.