Lab contractor cited for 2022 glove box breach

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Nov 3, 2023

The federal agency that oversees the country’s nuclear weapons has issued a preliminary violation notice to Los Alamos National Laboratory’s primary contractor for a glove box breach in 2022 that contaminated two workers and required one of them to undergo medical treatment.

The incident was deemed serious enough for the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration to cite Triad National Security for a lapse in worker safety.

The January 2022 breach in a sealed compartment — which has gloves attached so workers can handle radioactive material — contaminated the protective equipment and skin of two workers, according to a government watchdog’s report. One of the workers showed a high enough exposure to require treatment at the lab’s occupational medicine clinic.

“While Triad’s evaluation assigned no dose to the workers, the release of radioactive material was a near miss to a significant dose,” agency Administrator Jill Hruby wrote in a letter to lab Director Thom Mason, who heads Triad.

The incident was “of high safety significance” and warranted a $641,000 penalty, Hruby wrote.

However, the agency will waive the penalty because Triad already lost $1.6 million in contract fees due to deficiencies assessed for 2022, she wrote.

Glove box breaches have become more frequent in recent years as the lab gears up to produce 30 bowling ball-sized plutonium cores, or pits, that can detonate warheads. But this mishap was the last reported instance of an exposed worker needing medical treatment.

In an email, spokesman Steven Horak wrote the lab will do what the preliminary violation notice suggests.

“Los Alamos National Laboratory is deeply committed to the safety of our employees and began taking immediate actions to directly address the event that occurred in January 2022,” Horak wrote. “Since that time, we have taken several additional actions, and worked with NNSA to help prevent similar occurrences going forward.”

This the second violation notice the agency has issued to Triad this year.

In June, the agency cited the contractor for four incidents in 2021. And as with this notice, the penalties were waived because Triad had $1.4 million deducted from its contract fees due to deficiencies.

The first of these incidents happened on Feb. 11, 2021, when Triad did not confirm fissionable material placed in a drop box complied with the safety posting. As a result, the material exceeded the posted criticality safety limits.

The second was on March 3, 2021, when a worker did not conduct required self-monitoring after pulling out from the gloves attached to the sealed compartment in which radioactive material is handled. As a result, the worker didn’t recognize a breached glove nor the contamination on his hands, and then spread it to co-workers.

On March 31, 2021, Triad did not inform the operations center the lab’s vault baths — used to cool certain plutonium containers — needed filling. The second mistake occurred when a worker jammed open a spring-closed valve, bypassing a safety feature, and then left for another task.

Water poured through the valve, causing the baths to overflow. An alarm went off, but it failed to transmit to the operations center, whose personnel were unaware the baths were being filled. The overflow wasn’t discovered for several hours, and by then, 1,800 gallons had spilled.

On July 19, 2021, Triad assigned unqualified workers to fill the vault baths who turned the valves in the wrong sequence. Misaligned valves caused water to spill onto the floor and flow into an air vent and a glove box on a lower floor.

An anti-nuclear critic said the gravity of these violation notices should not be underestimated.

“These are issued only for serious reasons; they are not routine,” said Greg Mello, executive director of Los Alamos Study Group. “The first one was bad enough. Now we have another one.”

Mello disagreed with Hruby waiving the penalties, saying fines should be imposed on senior staff members personally so they have an incentive to improve safety.

Hruby issuing a written reprimand, despite being an ally of Mason, indicates how serious the lapses are, Mello said.

“So for her to do this is significant,” he said.

Greg Mello published comment:

Thank you Scott for catching this and writing about it. What I said about affecting senior lab management personally related to their performance bonuses, which Triad apportions as they see fit. With a real fine imposed, there would be less of those bonuses to go around, in aggregate. I think there needs to be more personal pain for the poor management at LANL, and other sites as well. Yes, Triad already paid somewhat, but they still made a fat profit on zero investment, which gets spread around these senior managers. It's a cost-plus contract, one in which the contractor has far too much power and the federal government, too little. Also, these enforcement actions take far too long -- 21 months in this case. That signals that "business as usual" should proceed and undercuts the seriousness of the enforcement. That said, the biggest root cause of these incidents is the rush to add a giant new mission to LANL's plutonium facility, namely pit production. The building, its equipment, its support facilities, and indeed the entire laboratory is not set up for this mission, which will always be a bad fit for the location and the site. Triad should have turned down the mission when Mason and his team discovered they would have to operate 24/7 to make even 20 pits per year. Or Hruby should have pulled the plug. It is hard for people who are used to executing a policy handed down from others to stand up and say, "No." That is not how one gets ahead in the corporate world. Indeed it is a recipe for ending one's career. Jill could still be a hero and point out that the emperor has no clothes here, in the LANL pit production business. LANL has already failed, by normal measures, and somebody of her stature needs to be very clear about the risks of continuing programs, the completion of which recedes faster than the calendar pages can be turned. It is important to add that the way safety is regulated by DOE, as set up by statute and regulations, is super complicated, so complicated that I doubt more than a few people at LANL really understand it, frankly. Basically the rules are not just facility-specific, but they come down to being glovebox-specific as well. This is a very complicated business. No recently-trained radiological control technician will understand them. In principle, safety managers do understand them, but the entire situation is a set-up for safety problems if and when stressed by schedule and other pressures. The political pressure on NNSA is to deliver pits, not to keep workers safe. Meanwhile LANL has had more than 1,600 federally-recognized and compensated occupational deaths, and many more occupational illnesses and disabilities. Total payouts, just for those whose cases are approved (many aren't), now total more than $1.7 billion for LANL. These are not safe jobs, quite apart from their questionable purpose.