LANL planned to replace gloves that caused radiation leak

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Jul 9, 2020

A Los Alamos National Laboratory employee tore a hole in a pair of protective gloves attached to a plutonium container — causing a breach that contaminated the work area — a day before the gloves were scheduled to be replaced, according to an incident report.

The report, posted on a U.S. Department of Energy website, provides more details on the breach last month at the lab’s plutonium facility that led to 15 workers being tested for radiation exposure.

The only employee who tested positive for radioactive contamination was the one packaging and weighing plutonium-238 oxide inside a sealed container known as a glove box. The 13 employees working elsewhere in the room and a worker who left 30 seconds before air-monitoring alarms sounded all tested negative, the report said.

The alarm went off after the worker pulled his hands and the gloves from inside the container and was securing the gloves outside the box, the report said.

A team investigating the incident found a small tear in the thumb of one of those gloves, plus contaminants on four other pairs secured on the container’s exterior.

The torn gloves had been one of 14 pairs that workers had deemed “operable but starting to feel worn” and were set to be replaced June 9. The breach occurred the day before the scheduled replacement.

A watchdog group said the incident underscores that plutonium can be hazardous no matter how careful crews are.

“It’s not like they were reckless,” said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “They had layers and layers of safety programs going on there and the worker was still contaminated.”

After the incident, lab officials emphasized the breach never posed a risk to public health and safety.

Safety protocols are strict for handling plutonium at the lab, the report said.

Gloves are inspected before a shift begins and frequently throughout the work day. Operators must check their hands for radioactive contamination whenever they remove them from the glove boxes.

After the breach, contaminants were detected on the one worker’s protective clothing as well as hair and skin, the report said. He went to the decontamination room where he washed off the residue with soap and water. He then was examined at an on-site medical facility.

Although crews decontaminated the room where the breach occurred, it was still “red-lit,” or restricted, as of June 16, the report said.

The plutonium-238 that was handled there is used in radioisotope power systems on some NASA spacecraft. It’s not the weapons-grade plutonium the lab uses to produce nuclear warhead triggers known as pits.

The push to get the lab to manufacture 30 pits a year will put more pressure on equipment and personnel and increase the chance of future incidents, Kovac said.

“Plutonium-238 — that’s a pretty low-key operation compared to pit production,” he said.

Greg Mello comment:
Khal, use the link in the left column. Joe Martinez, we are not talking about "jobs" here. But since you brought it up, according to the Department of Labor, by 2016 more than 1,600 people had lost their lives because of working at LANL. I guess they will be "staying" here all right.

Before getting to the serious problems with this article it needs to be said that contrary to what NNSA and others have said over the past two days, Pu-238 is indeed used in some warheads and is currently slated to be used in future warheads as well. By way of background, Pu-238 is about 275 times more radioactive than the isotope used in warhead cores (Pu-239).

In years past I was a hazardous waste safety inspector and at times hazardous incident officer for the state. From that background, this is what I see. The overall picture of safety protocols and management painted by this article and to some extent by Scott Kovac (thank you Scott K. for digging this up -- I assume it was you!) are obviously wrong. "Don't believe your lying eyes," is the message.

First of all, LANL's main criterion for when to replace gloves (when they start to "feel" worn out) is far too subjective and, given this accident, obviously deficient. If it was adequate there would not have been an accident.

Second, the operators said 14 gloves were "starting to feel worn" on June 1 and 2, but the gloves were not scheduled to be replaced until June 9, more than a week later. (From the number of people working at one time in this glovebox and in the room overall we can guess, although we cannot be sure, that these gloves got intensive use). It is not clear from the report who made the decision that, although they were "starting" to be worn out, they were "still operable." "Operable," sure, whatever that means, but were they safe? Apparently not, since there was a dangerous accident. Both the criteria for replacement and the way those criteria were implemented were and are insufficient. This is a management problem.

The article paraphrases Kovac as saying "plutonium can be hazardous no matter how careful crews are." "Plutonium CAN be hazardous?" Really? That sounds like LANL talking. Plutonium, especially Pu-238, IS hazardous, full stop. And obviously the crews and more importantly their supervision were NOT careful, because there was a potentially life-threatening accident! Are we supposed to believe no one is responsible for this, that it just sort of "happened"? This is exactly the message LANL would like to see in print. Oh, and gosh, LANL was ABOUT to change the gloves. It sounds like a teenager's excuse for not doing what he was supposed to do. The reality here is that LANL was more than a week late in changing the gloves, according to its own criterion.

Scott K., why would you say they were not reckless? They absolutely WERE reckless, and the proof is that they had an accident. Why would you say that they had "layers and layers of safety programs going on there?" Well if they did they weren't following them, because at least one worker got hurt. Scott W. follows up by repeating (again) that "[s]afety protocols are strict for handling plutonium at the lab, the report said." Well if they are strict they aren't strictly followed, are they?

Scott K. characterizes Pu-238 operations as "low-key" compared to pit production. That is true in regard to scale but not as regards the intensity of the radiation hazard.

Thank you for writing the story, but the future safety of workers depends on somebody being responsible for accidents. This accident was not an act of God. Mistakes were made. Deficient protocols need to be fixed and more stringently followed. The number of times people have gotten dosed in PF-4 makes a very long list, the true extent of which will never be known.

What is happening at the New Mexican is that LANL is being held to a lower performance standard than other industries in the state because of the "jobs" it provides, so maybe Mr. Martinez was really spot-on after all. The New Mexican does not even know how LANL proposes to spend the 1.1 BILLION dollars the New Mexico senators have gotten for pit production at LANL for just ONE year, staring October 1. The New Mexican does not have any idea what the environmental impact will be. Neither does the City of Santa Fe. Neither does the County. A program bigger than the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, which will totally transform the greater Santa Fe area if it goes forward, and both the largest newspaper and local governments don't know anything about it. How do we know this? Because there is no public plan, no site-wide environmental impact statement, no NOTHING coming from NNSA and LANL. Santa Fe and the rest of the region should be outraged. Mr. Martinez ought to be able to argue for plutonium production "jobs" if he wants, but we all ought to have some idea of what those jobs will cost us.