This comment on the article “Government watchdog says LANL could be doing more to prevent glove box contaminant releases” (Scott Wyland, Santa Fe New Mexican, 4/17/24), was published after the article on the same day. The article and comment are also posted here.
Thank you Scott, for this and previous stories. You have a big portfolio of responsibilities. The DNFSB letter validates the importance of the stories you have done on safety incidents at LANL’s plutonium facility, as they have come up. The overall safety posture, and the causes, are harder to write about because NNSA and LANL always say everything is great, and there is no external regulator or licensing authority to say otherwise with equal on-the-ground authority. As you note the DNFSB is an advisory body only. It is in my opinion and that of many others greatly understaffed. It is hard for them to recruit qualified staff, but the chronic staffing shortage is also by congressional design. The DNFSB is also under a lot of political pressure to not stand in the way of nuclear production. Right now they do not even have an operating quorum, which tells you something about the Senate which confirms their board members, and about the New Mexico senators and their commitment to safety. DNFSB has ONE full-time staff member at LANL, though others help from afar.
All that said, the report in question deals with micro-level issues. This is necessary but insufficient. Political and DNFSB staffing factors prevent a deeper treatment, which could get into root causes, which this report does not. Doing so would be perceived on Capitol Hill as meddling in policy, perhaps even as un-American. I kid you not.
The report mentions the insufficiency of federal staff involved in assuring safety at LANL. This too is a chronic problem. Local NNSA staff should be greatly increased, let us say doubled. During the Manhattan Project, Site Y (now LANL) was about one-half federal employees, mostly Army. The ratio of federal to non-federal workers in the NNSA archipelago is much too low overall. Contractors (who contribute to campaigns) rule, not feds. The “contractor assurance system” (CAS) model is used in order to minimize federal presence and responsibilities. The local NNSA manager and the highest federal safety official in Los Alamos is Mr. Ted Wyka. He is also the official tasked with turning LANL into an operating factory as fast as possible. You see the problem. Like DNFSB Wyka also finds it difficult to hire and train qualified federal safety officials to work beneath him, but in my opinion neither he nor the LANL director have made the very best macro-level decisions about LANL safety. It’s “The Mission” that is dominant.
The problem is that PF-4 cannot be made safe. It is a) crowded with people having different chains of command and work cultures, and b) in operation 24/7, which is inherently less safe. It is also subject to a flux of less-trained people, and has legacy safety problems which Wyka and Mason have agreed to postpone and/or slow-walk fixing in order to begin production faster. It is also old. There are both DoD and congressional production pressures as well as implicit pressure from the NM delegation, which insisted on the production mission here in the first place.
In what Jay says, we see as usual no opposition to the pit mission, or acknowledgement that it is inherently unsafe in LANL’s legacy facilities. In 2021 Coghlan wrote “What I do have some confidence in is that LANL is always going to screw up and cost too much, inherently keeping pit production limited there. Which beats the hell out of unconstrained pit production at the Savannah River Site.” In other words, Jay wants LANL to do pit production because LANL is bad at pit production. The principle kind of “screw ups” involve accidents, the subject of this DNFSB report and article. Coghlan’s group is working to make LANL the only pit factory as he says here, but because of the “inherent” problems, all this does is support having two new pit factories instead of one safer one in South Carolina.
The Dept. of Labor has paid over $1.82 billion in worker medical and death benefits at LANL. According to DOL, over 1,600 workers have died due to their LANL work.