Touring LANL inside the ‘security bubble’
Getting up close and personal with the ‘most exotic element on the periodic table’
LOS ALAMOS — It’s not the start of a standard tour when one of the people in charge tells your group about the armed men.
“They’re not there to protect you,” you’re told. “They’re there to protect the plutonium.” There’s also the pre-tour geiger counter demonstration. Did you know that the burnt orange glaze on an old Fiestaware dish really sets one of those things off?
Last week, Los Alamos National Laboratory allowed a group of outsiders, including myself, inside its plutonium facility, known as PF-4. Others on the tour included local elected officials and representatives of area pueblos.
Our walk-through was a rare opportunity to get a first-hand look at PF-4, the concrete 1970s building where lab employees use glove boxes to work making, maintaining and testing “pits” — the plutonium alloy cores of nuclear bombs — and plutonium fuel for NASA’s space program.
As the center of the country’s plutonium enterprise — which is growing as production of pits ramps up, for better or worse and specifically at Los Alamos — PF-4 is a big deal. The building is also often the focus of news stories in this newspaper and elsewhere when LANL gets dinged for safety lapses, including for its handling of plutonium. Allowing a first-hand look at PF-4, even under LANL’s tight security restrictions and as part of a controlled tour, was a welcome dose of transparency from the lab. We got to ask all the questions we wanted.
About those restrictions — I’m not allowed to say much about the security measures in place around PF-4. I may even be pushing the legal envelope by reporting that comment about the guys with guns.
Also, let me say that this report will be a bit fuzzy because of the security and not because of any glowing after-effects from close encounters with what LANL director Terry McMillan called “the most exotic element on the periodic table.”
I couldn’t take along a photographer or a cellphone for pictures or to make audio recordings of what we visitors were told. In the end, even my pen and notebook didn’t make it into PF-4.
Any notes would have been subject to review to make sure I was not describing “unclassified controlled nuclear information” — that’s UCNI in lab lingo — whose unauthorized distribution violates the Atomic Energy Act. It might have been fun to go ahead and take notes and see if the lab has code breakers up to the task of deciphering my messy penmanship. But I went on the tour armed only with the short-term memory capabilities of a 65 year old.
The biggest takeaway for me from the tour is that PF-4 is a serious place. It’s difficult to get into, even, to some degree, on a guided tour. We were told that the facility’s workers have to stand in long lines every day to make it through security. Our group entered while inside what our event agenda described as an “internal security bubble.”
Hands and the bottoms of the protective booties we wore over our shoes were checked for contamination every time we left a room where plutonium work takes place. I think I was the only person in the tour group that managed to mess up a simple four-step maneuver needed to exit the larger plutonium area, but at least I gave the others an example of what not to do.
We learned that PF-4’s workers are among the lab employees with a high-level security certification under what’s called the Human Responsibility Program, a title that only certain kinds of bureaucracies could come up with. Is there any other kind of responsibility than human responsibility? Maybe there’s a separate, nonhuman responsibility program for LANL’s extensive stock of artificial intelligence, in the form of supercomputers.
But I digress. The HRP employees, including the top brass like lab director Wallace, have to undergo annual background checks, psychological examinations and lie detector tests.
One more security item. Without going into illegal detail, I think, I’ll report here that PF-4 has structural provisions for use in case of a gun battle, apparently someone’s idea of a last-stand amenity back in the 1970s.
No glamor
PF-4 concrete spaces are not glamorous. There are, of course, no windows, no natural light. No gleaming machines are whirring along with flashing lights or giant control panels with lots of buttons. The work done in the spaces we saw is by hand.
We were shown mainly rooms lined with glove boxes. Some new ones are being built to improve seismic safety and boost visibility into the boxes where the detailed work takes place. And additional work shifts are planned to make more pits as part of a huge program to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
We didn’t see anyone manipulating anything in the glove boxes or using the long rubber sleeves that end in gloves which the workers use to reach inside the boxes through holes. One worker described the ritual he goes through to check the gloves for pinhole damage every day.
It looks like it would be really hard to work at a glove box, with one’s arms extended that way and separated from whatever you’re handling inside the box. I was told that the most prolific physical problem the workers have are issues like shoulder or elbow problems. The newer glove boxes have oval holes, said to be more ergonomic than round ones.
We did get close to plutonium. A half-dollar sized disc of the element was set up in a longer glove box space where a cannon of sorts would at some point blast a projectile at the disc, and the results would be observed and measured. Dissolved material from a pit taken from the nuclear weapons stockpile was inside a small beaker in one box for analysis, part of the lab’s work intended to guarantee that the bombs will work if they’re ever used, without undertaking actual test explosions.
Safety issues
In one room, we saw canisters that hold residue from the plutonium work, set to be repurposed or disposed of. The canisters were set inside a rectangle painted on the floor.
Our tour guides made a point of noting that placing one of the canisters even on the painted line around their designated area, much less over the line, would constitute a “process deviation” that ends up as a black mark on safety reports made public by the oversight Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. That kind of rule is an example of the kind of rigor necessary for plutonium work, they said.
Some of the most interesting comments of the day were about criticality, which describes an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. Things can “go critical” when too much plutonium is placed too close together. There hasn’t been a criticality accident at LANL since the 1950s, but the lab has gotten low ratings for criticality safety in recent years. A “criticality safety incident” got a lot of attention in 2017 when a worker exceeded limits by placing a pit shell into an enclosed space that already had plutonium metal inside.
Another report last year by the Center for Public Integrity highlighted a 2011 incident at LANL where eight finished plutonium rods were lined up for a celebratory photograph, which CPI said was described internally at the lab “as the most dangerous nuclear-related incident at that facility in years.”
As our tour group was being hauled away from PF-4, Bob Webster, principal associate director for the lab’s weapons program, addressed that incident. He said the rods couldn’t have gone critical without a couple of other factors coming into play — the presence of water and a different configuration of the rods. He also said a bit more plutonium would have been required.
Wallace said LANL is the “most transparent” weapons lab as it reports “level 5” criticality incidents — the least dangerous on a scale of 1 to 5 — to the DNFSB.
It was unusual just to hear top lab officials even discussing this stuff.
There’s probably a lot more I could report on this visit. But I can’t remember. And if I did, they might have to kill me.