Bathroom sink overflow raises safety issue at LANL

By Mark Oswald / Journal Staff Writer
Published: Friday, April 6th, 2018 at 6:53pm Updated: Friday, April 6th, 2018 at 6:58pm

Los Alamos National Laboratory. (EDDIE MOORE/JOURNAL)

SANTA FE – An overflowing bathroom sink has raised nuclear safety issues at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Water from the sink on the first floor of the lab’s Plutonium Facility recently leaked into a basement used to store drums of radioactive transuranic waste, according to a report by a federal oversight board.

The brief report by inspectors for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said the leak raises issues about “nuclear criticality safety,” or the issue of preventing uncontrolled nuclear reactions.

The water didn’t cause any problems, according to the lab. But the DNFSB suggested it could be a warning about what could happen if more dangerous liquids were involved. On the first floor of the Plutonium Facility, the water reached “an area near the aqueous processing rooms,” said the DNFSB.

The report says the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos Field Office is examining whether the incident “challenges assumptions” about what would happen if spills of “fissile solutions” — liquids able to undergo nuclear fission — were to leak into the basement where “large volume geometrics are currently uncontrolled.”

No one the Journal reached Friday could say with confidence what the phrase about uncontrolled geometrics means.

A LANL spokesman said, “During the week of March 5, 2018, a few gallons of water overflowed from a sink in one of our administrative areas of TA-55 (the lab’s Technical Area 55) with a small amount eventually settling in our basement rad storage area. The basement area of TA-55, which is specifically designed to isolate and contain water intrusions, functioned as designed and there were no incidents.

“There was no contamination associated with this water overflow, and it did not occur in an area of the facility where radioactive materials are processed.”

LANL critic Greg Mello of Los Alamos Study Group said the basement is a staging area for wastes containing fissile material. “If a fissile solution leak could find its way into the basement in sufficient quantity, a criticality (incident) could occur, especially in combination with other factors that might be present in any accident, such as fire-fighting water. This is going to have to be analyzed — and one way or another, fixed.”

“We never dreamed water could leak to the basement from the first (processing) floor, now apparently proved by a bathroom faucet,” said Jay Coughlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.