Nov 18, 2011  

By John Fleck
From the Albuquerque Journal

Members of a federal safety panel meeting in Santa Fe on Thursday expressed impatience with federal efforts to reduce nuclear safety risks at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

“We’re a little frustrated,” said Peter Winokur, chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. 

Winokur’s comments came during a public hearing at the convention center probing nuclear safety at the lab’s current facilities, emergency preparedness and plans for new buildings at the nuclear weapons design and manufacturing center. 

Much of the discussion focused on the lab’s Plutonium Facility, a 1970s-era building that is the nation’s only facility for processing plutonium, the dangerously radioactive material at the heart of nuclear weapons, including the manufacture of weapon components. 

As the only facility in the country capable of doing such work, the building needs to last for the next 50 years, noted safety board member John Mansfield. During that time, Mansfield noted, there is a 1.5 percent risk each year of a catastrophic earthquake, which the lab needs to guard against. 

Winokur and his colleagues praised the lab for moving quickly to make seismic repairs to the Plutonium Facility, known as PF4, where a study earlier in the year found new risks in the event of a major earthquake. 

But board members questioned lab and federal officials about whether the steps being taken meet a federal requirement that the lab and federal government provide “adequate protection” to workers and the public. 

“You need to provide adequate protection every moment of the day,” Winokur said. 

Lab director Charles McMillan said he believes the Plutonium Facility as it is today, even before a series of seismic upgrades now under way, would be a safer place to be in a major earthquake than his own house. “It’s a relatively new home,” McMillan said. “We have a much better understanding of the pedigree of PF4 and the strength of the building in a seismic event.” 

The Plutonium Facility has been a focus of intense interest on the part of the Safety Board, a Congressionally chartered body set up to provide independent advice and oversight of U.S. nuclear weapons operations. 

Driven in part by the Safety Board’s concerns and in part by the lab’s own analysis of its problems, Los Alamos is in the midst of a major seismic upgrade for the building, to strengthen it so that it does not fall down in a major quake. 

But other necessary fixes, including improvements to the building’s ventilation system to prevent plutonium from escaping in an earthquake, could take until 2020 to complete – if the money is available. 

The top federal official testifying at the hearing acknowledged that, because of federal deficits, obtaining the needed funding is a big “if.” 

“I think we all realize that what’s going on in the country is severe cost constraints,” said Don Cook, who heads the Office of Defense Programs in the National Nuclear Security Administration. 

That answer did not sit well with the safety board. “You must provide adequate protection to workers and the public,” said board chairman Winokur. “It’s not a matter of cost.”