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I was interested to see the photograph from 2011 and found this: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-federal...

It's pretty scary how mundane they look.

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"Virtually all of the Los Alamos engineers tasked with keeping workers safe from criticality incidents decided to quit, having become frustrated by the sloppy work demonstrated by the 2011 event and what they considered the lab management’s callousness about nuclear risks and its desire to put its own profits above safety."

This is key. It's hard to find criticality safety engineers, and their absence (as well as management not giving a damn) was probably a key factor in the 2016 incident.

Having the wrong management is almost worse than having unqualified engineers.

I worked in a startup where they had put the Systems Operations (as in, Linux datacenter guys) under the Chief Marketing Officer for about a year for (reasons).

Three years later, we are STILL cleaning up after that mess. Wrong management creates problems that aren't so much a result of ineffective management... wrong management seems to always move resources away from things that most engineers would call "normal and customary processes" (like patching software or updating libraries that software is dependent upon) and that's how you end up with Equifax. Or a smoking hole in the desert somewhere in New Mexico.

Indeed! There's mounting evidence that Equifax simply didn't "get" application development in addition to operations and patching. I doubt the developers of their vulnerable mobile app were responsible for patching. As such, we've seen security issues which span the company where it's likely the mobile app developers not only didn't report to the same management chain as those in operations, but likely reported to entirely different organizations. This of course points to management issues all the way to the top of the company.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40468811/heres-why-equifax-yanke...

That's a great point that is often missed here. You can get alot done with barely qualified individual contributors if there is enough process in place and the people calling the shots understand what they are doing. It's not fun, but possible.

Unqualified people making bad decisions are always fatal.

You can make that exact same argument about security in software development and operations. If management doesn't think it is important it will go downhill pretty quick.

But it's a national lab. There should be relatively few profits to be made, right?

It's operated by contractors paid by the government. The primary variable to their profit margin is "overhead".

How much profit have Lockheed and other defense contractors made over the past hundred years? I'd expect that it's a significant percentage of defense spending in that time.

Looking at the ID on the one bar, I'm kind of surprised that they'd allow 8s and Bs to be valid characters. Seems dangerous if two rods get mixed up or misidentified.

So is 1, i, j, 7, l, 5, s, o, 0 just the tip of the iceberg here

They did not allowed lower cases which helped alot. "L" was easily distinguished from "I" |_, so was "B": |3 from 8.

This. Pick a good font and the problem goes away.

And then you have to enforce the font in all written communications and emails that mention things by serial.

You also need to allow for legibility in the face of damage, if that could lead to ambiguity.

„The exact cost to taxpayers of idling the facility is unclear, but an internal Los Alamos report estimated in 2013 that shutting down the lab where such work is conducted costs the government as much as $1.36 million a day in lost productivity.“

Homeresque

Plutonium, Uranium, and the other radioactive elements are chemically just metals, so they don't look particularly different from any other metal.

> And most remarkably, Los Alamos’s managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards. When the Energy Department on Feb. 1 released its annual report card reviewing criticality risks at each of its 24 nuclear sites, ranging from research reactors to weapon labs, Los Alamos singularly did “not meet expectations.”

That sounds almost suspicious. It's hard to actually articulate that suspicion, but nuclear material is involved here.

From earlier paragraphs:

> In 2013, [officials in Washington] worked with the lab director to shut down its plutonium handling operations so the workforce could be retrained to meet modern safety standards.

> Those efforts never fully succeeded, however, and so what was anticipated as a brief work stoppage has turned into a nearly four-year shutdown of portions of the huge laboratory building where the plutonium work is located, known as PF-4.

What...?

My first thought is "front for clandestine operation." How, or what, I don't know; I don't even know if something like that would be viable. If a TLA wants to play with nuclear stuff, couldn't they make their own base, or would they need an existing one? And if they did need to use these kinds of facilities, surely they'd be able to keep the media out.

Okay maybe I'm wrong. I'll leave this comment here as a suggestion that maybe this line of thinking isn't correct after all. (I've been figuring this out as I've typed.)

The national labs in general almost certainly do plenty of work for clandestine organizations already. I doubt they need the excuses related to mishandling of dangerous material. They just never discuss those things with the press.

> "What's in section PF-3?"

> "That's classified, I can't discuss it."

> "What's in section PF-4?"

> "That's where we used to work on plutonium for DoE and IAEA but we had a pattern of problems there and it was shut down."

Okay, that's a very fair point. Thanks.

(Along with, uh, "do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by manglement")

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