The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is an independent safety board. In a recent report, the DNFSB raised serious concerns about the lack of training of LANL workers to properly handle nuclear materials.
     Many safes constructed to contain nuclear materials require an empty buffer zone of six inches around them. However there have been several incidents in which items were discovered atop the safes. These events caused managers to add “operator aids” to help their workers identify which safes must remain clear.
     The DNFSB report mentioned that inspectors found items placed on several nuclear material safes and a welding curtain propped up against another. The report said, “Facility personnel are working on methods to prevent these occurrences. This is a challenge given the rapid increase of staffing in the facility.”
      The report claims that it is an especially problematic situation because construction workers and trades people are not trained to deal with these “criticality safety” postings the way that nuclear material handlers are. Criticality is the point at which a nuclear reaction becomes self-sustaining which can result in an explosion. The LANL did not respond to questions about the DNFSB report.
      Critics of the LANL procedures say that these failures occur because of mixed crews carrying out daily operation at the facilities with construction crews not trained to work in a nuclear environment. Manages who are trying to deal with the chaos encounter difficulties.
      Greg Mello is an executive director of the nonprofit Los Alamos Study Group. He said, “They have new workers being trained, construction workers on the site, schedule pressures [and] they frequently work at night. Everything is very crowded. You add it all up together, and it’s not a good situation for safety.”
      The number of workers and the possibility of additional problems will increase as the LANL comes closer to constructing the plutonium pits needed to detonate nuclear warheads according to Mello. Putting so many workers into the building could overload its capacity.
      Federal officials are asking the LANL to construct thirty of the pits a year by 2026. They also intend to have the Savannah River Site in South Carolina manufacture an additional fifty plutonium pits per year in the 2030s.
     Jay Coghlan is an executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. He said, “Los Alamos is rapidly ramping up, and doing a lot of new hires.” He added that the LANL has a bad record of worker safety problems at its plutonium facility. Expanding the number of on-site workers there will exacerbate an already unsafe situation.
     Mello said that overhauling a facility that was built in the late 1970s to adhere to modern safety and fire codes and meet the demand of the upcoming pit production is an expensive, complex project. He said that it seems inevitable that construction tasks will impact plutonium operations. He added that “It has so many different, moving parts, and they all have to work together in the right order, And it’s very complicated.”
     According to the DNFSB report, when areas are required to remain clear, workers paint “no storage zones” on the floor and rope them off. In the long term, managers intend to assess controls, such as installing a physical cage around safes containing nuclear materials and training workers who don’t usually deal with nuclear materials.