The skin of two workers in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility were contaminated in late November, according to a Dec. 5 Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report.

On Nov. 21, a maintenance worker performing routine maintenance on a pump in the facility’s basement set off an alarm on the final monitor on the way out of the facility due to contamination on their hand.

The pump services a system known to be contaminated by aged weapons-grade plutonium, LANL spokesperson Steven Horak wrote in an email to The New Mexican.

Monitors previously went off when maintenance workers were working on the same pump. The source of the contamination on the individual worker is thought to come from contaminated oil stemming from the pump, according to the Dec. 5 report.

A few days later, on Nov. 25, a worker’s finger was contaminated with a “hot particle” — a small radioactive particle that, according to the Department of Energy, can lead to “extremely high dose rates to a localized area.”

The worker had been using tools from the plutonium facility’s basement to turn valves and power down systems.

The source of the plutonium particle, detected during required monitoring when the worker was exiting the facility, hadn’t been pinned down at the time of the report. According to the report, particle contamination often doesn’t have an “obvious source.”

In the two incidents, Horak wrote, workers “followed all safety precautions” and no one was injured. Both workers were successfully decontaminated, according to the report.

Nevertheless, “evaluating and evolving procedures is an essential part of the process of responding to events such as these,” Horak wrote.

The incidents came soon after three workers were contaminated at the plutonium facility during the removal of a glovebox window on Nov. 19.

Horak wrote that no update on those workers is currently available, as estimating the uptake of plutonium-238, an isotope of plutonium, takes several months.

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Published comments by Greg Mello:

Thank you for keeping up with this. According to Robert Peters of the Heritage Foundation, who accepted the opportunity to debate me, and on the other side the head of NNSA, at a forum we organized at the National Press Club in late 2024, LANL plutonium workers should be willing and ready to die as a result of their work, just like soldiers who accept some mortal risks in training and more in combat. Of note, we had hoped to bring the Union of Concerned Scientists onto that panel in place of Heritage, but UCS (which, unrealistically, wants LANL to be the sole plutonium pit factory for the nation) was too chicken to show up. That's how the cookie crumbles in DC -- ineffectual liberals get outmaneuvered and outgunned by hard-core hawks, in Congress and otherwise. In effect, they too are setting up LANL for more contamination events, while creating the need for two pit factories instead of one. Speaking now about our own communities, folks have to stand up for what they believe in, and what their grandparents believed in, and do so in a conscientious, organized, truth-oriented manner, or the forces of organized capital -- capital C Capital -- along with the federal government that serves those interests as much as vice versa, will determine everything important.