Touring LANL inside the ‘security bubble’ Mark Oswald
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 pretour 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 firsthand look at PF-4, the concrete 1970s building where lab employees use glove boxes to make, maintain and test “pits” — the plutonium alloy cores of
nuclear bombs — and plutonium fuel for NASA’s space program.
As the center of the nation’s plutonium enterprise — which is growing as production of pits ramps up — PF-4 is a big deal. The building is often the focus of news stories in this newspaper and elsewhere when LANL gets dinged for safety lapses.
Allowing a firsthand 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 security measures 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 Wallace called “the most exotic element on the periodic table.”
I couldn’t take along a photographer or a cellphone for pictures. 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 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 of a 65 year old.
The biggest takeaway 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 the facility’s workers stand in long lines each day to make it through security.
We learned that PF-4’s workers are among the lab employees with a high-level security certification under what’s called the Human Reliability Program, a title that only certain kinds of bureaucracies could come up with.
PF-4 concrete spaces are not glamorous. There are no windows, no natural light. No giant control panels with lots of buttons. Work done in the spaces we saw is by hand.
We were shown mainly rooms lined with glove boxes. Some new models improve seismic safety and boost visibility of where the detailed work takes place.
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 daily ritual he goes through to check the gloves for pinhole damage.
It looks like it would be really hard to work at a glove box, with one’s arms extended and separated from whatever you’re handling inside the box. I was told that the most prolific physical problem the workers have are issues with shoulders or elbows. 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 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 to guarantee bombs will work if they’re ever used — without any actual test explosions.
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 event 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 placed 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.