Safety board says LANL unready to handle emergency
In a letter to
The letter includes a critical report that says the
Dated
In his
A spokeswoman for the board did not respond to questions about the report by deadline.
The lab directed questions to the federal government.
The lab and the federal agency are "taking proactive measures to strengthen emergency preparedness and response based on lessons learned from these drills and exercises," Wolf added. "NNSA is committed to having world-class emergency management capabilities to protect our employees, the public and the environment."
But staff members of the
According to the July report, these include a lack of coordination and communication during an emergency exercise, delays in eliminating a security threat, failure to evacuate vulnerable workers and lack of protection for workers and first responders. In one training exercise involving a hazardous materials release, the report says, responders walked right through the contaminated area without protective equipment.
The board's criticism of the lab and the
Other safety board members have opposed Sullivan's call to disband the panel, saying its independent role in identifying safety issues at nuclear labs has rarely been so crucial.
Many of the deficiencies cited in the board's July report also were identified during a series of actual emergencies at the Los Alamos lab this year.
On one Saturday in September, three workers were contaminated with radiation at the lab's plutonium facility. In a weekly report citing the incident, the safety board said the lab needed to ensure "adequate on-call support during off-hours" -- a problem the board had identified previously during emergency training drills.
The lab also has failed to conduct an off-hours drill at a nuclear facility for four years, according to the board's July report.
In April, a fire ignited at the lab's plutonium facility, sending a worker to the hospital with second-degree burns. At the time, a safety board staff member found there was "uncertainty on roles and responsibilities and nomenclature regarding incident command."
Ineffective communication and failure to coordinate with first responders was a key problem observed by safety board staff during several emergency drills, even before the April fire.
The county's "public safety staff routinely participate in a variety of emergency exercises with their counterparts at LANL," Habiger said, "including a full-scale exercise each fall that includes communications staff. The goal of every exercise is to test processes and procedures in order to identify areas for improvement and find ways that we can work together toward solutions."
Records requested by the New Mexican in July under the Inspection of Public Records Act show that in May and June, there were 65 "emergency response" events at the lab involving the
The scenarios created for exercises testing the lab's response system are much more dire than the recent accidents at the lab -- such as a widespread chemical or radiation release, an active shooter or a wildfire burning through radioactive waste sites, each posing a deadly threat well outside the lab's perimeter.
Safety board staff observed numerous troubling failures during these drills: the lab did not involve
The lab has not been sufficiently self-critical in assessing its emergency response performance, the safety board report says, adding that the lab also has failed to update its emergency planning documents to coincide with real-life threats.
For instance, Area G, the lab's largest hazardous waste site, lacked crucial technology needed for an emergency response to a wildfire even though the lab faced this threat during the Cerro Grande Fire in 2000 and the
The board also found conflicting evacuation instructions for workers at the site.
In addition, it said, the lab failed to update safety documents for Area G to include dangers posed by volatile drums containing nitrate salt -- a mixture similar to that of a drum that burst in 2014 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in
"Based on its observations," the report states, "the staff team concluded that the LANL facility-level emergency programs are immature and inconsistently exercised, and the technical planning documents have unrecognized weaknesses.
"As designed and executed," the report continues, "the LANL emergency management program could meet all of its exercise objectives but still fundamentally fail to protect the workers and the public."
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LANL problems in 2017
January: A federal agency finds the lab had 24 infractions of a safety program meant to prevent runaway nuclear reactions;
Early June: The
Sources: Reports from the
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