A lab critic said he’s concerned about flaws in worker training, equipment and inspections contributing to glove box breaches as LANL gears up for producing plutonium pits for warhead triggers.
“As things ramp up, we’re bound to have more problems,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
| March 8, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
Los Alamos National Laboratory had two additional breaches of a sealed radioactive-material compartment known as a glove box in January, bringing the total to three in one month, according to a government watchdog.
One employee damaged a glove attached to a sealed compartment while manually moving material with a disabled trolley through the enclosed space, causing enough of a release to contaminate the person’s face.
Another employee noticed contaminants on a glove that might have been punctured in a previous shift and not caught by the crew that regularly inspects the compartments, a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board manager wrote in an email.
“It is possible that a breach existed that they were not able to detect with their current inspection capabilities,” wrote Tara Tadlock, associate director for the safety board’s operations.
The lab has acknowledged the inspection methods can fall short and is looking at how to improve them, Tadlock added.
Tadlock, who elaborated in the email on the board’s Feb. 4 report, couldn’t say when exactly the two incidents occurred, other than the same reporting period near the end of January.
The latest two breaches weren’t as serious as the Jan. 7 incident that released double the yearly limit for airborne contaminants in a work area. Four workers were contaminated, with one having to undergo a chelation treatment for removing heavy metals from the body.
That incident prompted the National Nuclear Security Administration, a U.S. Energy Department branch, to form an investigative panel.
The agency later said initial tests on the affected workers showed radiation exposure was under the threshold that required the accident probe but that it would continue to investigate the incident.
In an email, a spokeswoman wrote the lab takes all glove box mishaps seriously.
“Glove boxes are mechanical devices, and it is of the utmost importance to ensure workers have access to the best training and safety procedures possible when they use them,” spokeswoman Jennifer Talhelm wrote.
But inspectors noted in the report workers need to be trained better on best practices, Tadlock wrote in her email.
At least one worker failed to comply with guidance put in place after a June 2020 glove box breach that exposed 14 workers to airborne contaminants, she wrote.
Those guidelines call for workers to remove their hands carefully from the gloves so they remain inside the box, she wrote. Yanking one’s hands out too forcefully can pull part of the gloves into the outside air, causing a release if a glove is punctured, she added.
One of the incidents happened when an employee was manually working a broken trolley to move material from one glove box to another. The trolley’s belt broke down from normal wear and tear and is being fixed, Talhelm wrote.
A lab critic said he’s concerned about flaws in worker training, equipment and inspections contributing to glove box breaches as LANL gears up for producing plutonium pits for warhead triggers.
“As things ramp up, we’re bound to have more problems,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
The lab recently went to 24-hour operations at the plutonium facility, with the tempo and complexity of work expected to increase over time, the safety board’s report said.
At a December forum, lab Director Thom Mason said an estimated 1,277 workers were added in 2021, half of them new hires. That’s the largest single-year growth in the lab’s work force since the early 1990s, he said.
The growth in personnel and activity is troubling, Coghlan said, given the lab’s struggles with workplace violations.
“And these problems remain unresolved,” he said. “Even when Los Alamos was not producing pits for the stockpile, there were safety incidents.”
But Talhelm insists the lab is evolving and tries to learn from the glove box incidents.
“We investigate these events thoroughly because safety and learning from every experience is our top priority,” she wrote.