Safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Lab’s work on U.S. nuclear warheads

I'm picturing workers who have never spent time on wikipedia reading about nuclear accidents, much less in any books.

The list of nuclear accidents is hair-raising. The thought that a co-worker might assemble a near-critical mass nearby is... beyond hair-raising. Where the heck are they getting these guys, and what are they telling them?!

This issue was covered in a NPR segment last year about an even older Harvard Business Review article. How to prevent the next oil rig disaster - solution - get the workers to admit vulnerability.

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/17/48220344...

https://hbr.org/2008/07/unmasking-manly-men

Is this another situation where these are the only companies that can do the work, so the government has no choice but to work with them in order to stay on some kind of schedule?

It must be pretty hard to disrupt the "government contracts for nuclear weapons production" industry..

I don't think the author was trying to create a conversation about the misalignment of the lab's management and safety. The article goes out of its way to sensationalize industrial accidents with "NUCLEAR RADIATION" to construct a narrative of uninformed fear of anything associated with nuclear material.

It reminded me a bit of some of the Discovery Channel's shows where they stress that if this multi-million ton container ship doesn't stay between the two entrance markers to the harbor, it kill everyone on board and probably destroy millions of dollars in goods. The entrance markers are 5 miles apart. The fact is accurate, the narrative is not.

If you want to be really scared go read the OSHA reports on any of DOW's chemical plants. I would be willing to wager that more people have died in the last 5 years of industrial accidents at their plants than all of Los Alamos. The Union Carbide Bhopal disaster killed over 2,000 people, one accident.

The point is the article was not written to compare the risk of accidents at Los Alamos to that of other similarly sized industries, nor was it written to highlight the misalignment of lab management with safety goals. It was written to characterize nuclear materials as scary and dangerous and carefully avoids any way for the reader to compare that risk with other risks they are both familiar with and are not concerned about.

In short, it is anti-nuclear propaganda.

Slotin's cautionary tale is such scary founding lore of the nuclear industry... Complacency born from habit is awfully powerful and that may be even scarier.

The radiation dosage section of that article is a mess and I think shows a limitation of wikipedia. The writers managed to not use the same unit in any two consecutive sentences and sometimes not even with in the same sentence and don't bother providing any way to relate the different units.

Slotin's story is such a great example of complacency. "Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol. ... the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a prompt critical reaction and a burst of hard radiation."

It's also used as an example in the article.

"Cherenkov radiation could also be responsible for the "blue flash" experienced in an excursion due to the intersection of particles with the vitreous humour within the eyeballs of those in the presence of the criticality."

That's a pretty alarming idea!!

"Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser enumerates accidents related to nuclear weapons, many of which do not end in criticality due to sheer luck in most cases. Illusion of safety indeed.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

It's really entertaining and worth reading, but it's still intentionally biased to almost suggest "a little bit of radiation can be good for you" in a way that smoking was presented in older times by the tobacco companies.

And it's not so. An individual can be lucky, but it's not something to be approached with "don't worry". The proofs are in Eileen Welsome's "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files

Much more depressing than Mahaffey's book.

And example of the attitude of these responsible, Welsome, speaking in 1999:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?153507-1/plutonium-files

"Los Alamos National Laboratory told me they knew nothing about the experiment and in fact denied that it occurred even though it was a subject of the congressional report in 1986."

It's been a pretty slow, sad unraveling of LANL (and to some degree the other two DP labs). The latest stories are pretty predictable given the transition from UC to LANS about a decade ago (I left the lab after the transition, since it was a morale mess - I really enjoyed my time there for about a decade before the change though). Things were already bad before that - the whole change of management from UC was in part due to a string of safety and security issues. Interestingly, I believe the issues that are currently being reported about have roots that trace all the way back to the last facility for doing that sort of work that got shut down up near Denver (Rocky Flats). The issues today are hardly new or novel - there has been some serious rotting going on within the NW complex since the Cold War began to wind down almost 30 years ago.

according to reports it's tasteable (metallic) and visible (blue light). The problem is just, when that happens it's too late.

Even if you can see/taste (air pollution) or hear (loud noises like gunshots or machinery) it people still actively resist measures to mitigate/prevent harm!

Works well enough with religion, though.

Competition in search for excellence is a dangerous tool, management implements a metric and the departments optimize for the metric no matter what the long-term goals are. This is how Sears became run into the ground: http://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys...

Armed forces around the world rely on esprit de corps. The British SAS don't have to compete against Navy Seals to know they are the best, they know already.

In the years leading up to World War I, the Royal Navy was convinced that rate of fire was everything.

Every ship drilled to maximize their rate of fire. Commanders of vessels who could not keep up with their peers were sacked.

When the Battle of Jutland came around, the Royal Navy greatly outnumbered the Kreigsmarine, and caught it unaware. The engagements were incredibly in the United Kingdom's favour.

Numerically, the battle was a disaster for the Royal Navy. Its losses were double that of their opponent. One of the reasons for it was that a number of RN ships exploded after taking a single hit - while German ones took shell after shell, and stayed afloat.

In their zeal to optimize their firing rate, the Royal Navy did away with the simple precaution of installing airlocks between their ammunition storerooms, and their gun rooms. You see - opening and closing an airlock every time you needed to get to and from the ammunition room wasted too much time.

Hitting a German gun room would destroy the gun. Hitting a British gun room would destroy the entire ship. But boy, did those gun crews shoot fast.

Unless your competitive process rigorously accounts for every form of cut corners, you're going to get what you measure... With some shortsighted optimizations thrown in.

> Competition is a healthy thing.

It is a way to incentivize and improve efficiency, but it can also be a very expensive way to do so. It requires a lot of redundancy. You're effectively doing the work multiple times in parallel and discarding the loser.

That's fine when you're talking small farmers growing strawberries who can switch to another crop if it turns out their strawberries aren't good enough.

But running multiple nuclear weapon processing facilities simultaneously and pitting them against each other is an insanely costly way of improving safety.

Charge more.

The current political talking point is that the private sector can do it cheaper. Which is exactly what you get with contractors: A mandate to pick the lowest bidder, and to not let it languish in RFP (by lobbying, typically).

France has the right model with nuclear power creation and generation through a vertically-integrated state owned company, Areva. Our stockpile has to be an effective deterrent. We shouldn't trust contractors with our stockpiles, that process should be vertical too, damn the costs involved.

As a former DOE lab employee, I can't even begin to imagine the hassle of changing operating contracts, although LANL has really been putting forth extraordinary effort to get the DOE to try.

What's most irritating is that the DOE use a broad brush and go overboard where it's easy and clearly don't do enough where it's hard. I had to attend ladder training before I was allowed to climb down under the 4' floor in my computer room and the rule was made that we had to use ladders all the time. You can't even fit the ladders in the tile holes, but the rule was on the books because it was "safe!". There were so many of those boneheaded rules, but these boneheads are allowed near plutonium to photograph it for no scientific purpose? Grrrrr

Do you mean in the 2nd paragraph? I think they're using it correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass