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A near-disaster at a nuclear weapons lab takes toll on America’s arsenal (2017)

327 points by midwestfounder 4y ago

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Some people say suicide is never justified, but I don't believe people who say such things comprehend the horrors of acute radiation poisoning.
- jonstewart 4y ago
  That was my reaction reading about the accident in Japan. Anyone who gets a guaranteed lethal dose of radiation like that should be given a large mercy dose of morphine to kill them so they don't have to endure their skin falling off. It seems inhumane to keep someone on life support in such cases.
crooked-v 4y ago
So I guess it turns out that Homer Simpson was more realistic than we thought... all the way through to only avoiding nuclear accidents through sheer luck.
- surement 4y ago
  the book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser highlights many closer calls than this and is very good reading, if a bit disconcerting
- fragmede 4y ago
  If by avoided you mean physicists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin dying from acute radiation syndrome (Demon Core), then yeah.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Homer is safer. He chucks a single rod out on the street in the opening scene, keeping it separate from the rest. At work he is lazy, so by doing nothing, he is not combining rods together.
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    >At work he is lazy, so by doing nothing, he is not combining rods together. And whenever he is required to do something, disaster occurs. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwV24Bskyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwV24Bskyw>
    - Tangurena2 4y ago
      Like Y2k remediation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWPdBhlsBYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWPdBhlsBYI
- tragomaskhalos 4y ago
  More Simpsons prescience: I believe it is Lenny who observes, when Homer is running for the office of town garbage collection supremo, "Eh, Homer's a great nuclear safety technician, but I don't know if I trust him with my garbage".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
CobaltFire 4y ago
Putting a profit motive anywhere near anything that is safety critical is almost never a good idea. Naval Nuclear Power has it's issues, yet it is so safe that we have almost no incidents. That's because things like this don't happen there due to the culture of safety. That said, this is about production rather than operation, but the overall communities are relatively small and aligned.
- eru 4y ago
  > Putting a profit motive anywhere near anything that is safety critical is almost never a good idea. Why? And exactly how do you mean that? Is the safety track record of private industry worse than that of eg non-profit or state owned industry.
  - Retric 4y ago
    It’s hard to do a direct comparison as government jobs tend to inherently be more risky and accident reporting rates vary. An Air Force pilot isn’t directly analogous to an airline pilot nor is a police officer even vaguely equivalent to private security. Private sector hospitals, which are arguably the closest direct analog with public sector counterparts, have higher rates of workplace injury than public sector hospitals. By comparison private teachers have lower rates, but work with less at risk populations etc. PS: Reports of illness are noticeably higher in the public sector, but that likely relates to differences in PTO etc.
    - eru 4y ago
      Thanks. I was more thinking of industrial accidents, for example. In any case, when given the right incentives, profit seeking companies are excellent at promoting safety. Similarly, bureaucrats working for organisations without a profit-motive don't magically follow the same preferences we might dream up in our armchairs. They also need to be given the right incentives.
      - redanddead 4y ago
Arainach 4y ago
The photo didn't shut things down. A culture of disregard for safety over years, and a failure by management to take the issue seriously, shut down the lab.
- xattt 4y ago
  You’re right, but eyeballs want to peek at plutonium and secretly want to see the stuff glow as green rods.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I admit it's alluring. It's just a chunk of greyish metal, how dangerous could it be? Radioactivity is already a mysterious and fascinating and alluring phenomenon, and somehow radioactive things not looking particularly dangerous only adds to that effect. There's something strange about ionizing radiation: it's extremely dangerous, yet we have never evolved the ability to detect it and have no intuition for it.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      > never evolved the ability to detect it How much of a problem was it before we started mining uranium and putting it into glass? That was only 100-200 years ago, I think?
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        There was a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon. But that was 2 billion years ago. It ran for long enough that a microbe evolved to harvest the radiation to use in place of regular chemical energy sources. Which still exists.
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        Hasn't there always been a risk of radon appearing in basements and groundwater? Regardless, it's clear that radiation was not enough of an evolutionary "problem" for our bodies to evolve to cope with it, beyond whatever we get from the sun. But that's just the thing! We are so used to our bodies mostly doing the right thing in response to various dangers: bitter is poison, cold is frostbite/hypothermia, burning pain is fire/burns, nausea/disgust is disease, thirst is dehydration, etc. Ionizing radiation is weird because it literally destroys our tissues, but does so indirectly by destroying our DNA (as far as I understand anyway), but we never had any evolutionary reason to be able to "feel" our DNA being destroyed, so we evolved neither the ability to detect it happening nor the ability to see or detect radiation in the environment. I suspect that many industrial chemicals and poisons in a similar category, e.g. many poisons are either neutral or sweet-smelling/tasting. But radiation is especially weird and scary because it's such an unfamiliar phenomenon to begin with, unlike poison which most humans seems to understand instinctively.
wisnoskij 4y ago
They keep saying that profit seeking was the issue, but taking selfies with plutonium, running a lab for 4 years that produces nothing, and not having any employees that don't understand the most basics of nuclear physics does not sound like profit seeking. It sounds like someone just has way too much money and runs a nuclear weapons lab as vanity project.
- xeromal 4y ago
  In the article, it looks like the public workers before the buyout were also careless so it sounds like people who work around dangerous plutonium just become careless over time.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  If you continued to read the article, you'd see that there was a culture of throwing caution to the wind to increase productivity at not only that lab, but other nuclear facilities around the world. Hell, the article even went on to say that workers at the facility even came up with a euphemism for orders that ignored basic safety protocols, they called them "Bubba said" orders. And the article said that after those criticality events, those in charge of the facility and safety of personnel just had people keep working instead of evacuating.
  - ars 4y ago
    > And the article said that after those criticality events, those in charge of the facility and safety of personnel just had people keep working instead of evacuating. And how exactly did they convince those employees to keep working? The employees are not making extra for not following rules, do people really just not care about their lives? (I don't for a second believe someone working in a nuclear lab would be unaware of criticality, so ignorance can't be the explanation.)
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      There is a very gung ho culture in labs about safety. It slows you down to do things right and when it comes to reviews the cowboys (and girls) who do things wrong but fast get better reviews because they get more done. Nuclear labs kill the people inside them at worst. Bio labs ... Well there's a reason why I think covid was the worst lab accident in human history.
nimbius 4y ago
brought to you by the guys who learned nothing from a string of criticality accidents. I'm not surprised. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
ineedasername 4y ago
I would have though the decision tree for placement of concentrated plutonium was firmly established after the demon core incidents, set roughly in stone as the following: Should I bring high purity plutonium samples together? | V Do you want to die a horrible radiated death taught in textbooks for decades? | | V V No. Yes | | V V Then don’t you’re fired. It seems like Los Alamos may be in need of a fresh printout of the above & a photocopier + stapler to adhere a copy to the foreheads of all of their technicians.
- bitL 4y ago
  Fired or fried?
  - toss1 4y ago
    plausibly both
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    That would depend on whether they read the flow chart before or after coming to a decision. But I think it would almost always be an either/or, not both: It would seem a little unethical to fire someone after they fried themselves & thereby performed a great service, making the next generation of techs much more likely to keep themselves both in the gene pool & lifelong contributors to scientific knowledge through their career. Consider those fried persons & object lessons to be sort of the “Leeroy Jenkins” of their profession.
    - Crespyl 4y ago
      At least they got chicken?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bmc7505 4y ago
  Your flowchart neglects to mention the potential upside: Do you want to experience the results of runaway nuclear chain reaction firsthand? Become a Wikipedia entry? Impress the labmates with your prowess at tickling the dragon's tail?
gonzo41 4y ago
There's a great Nicholas cage quote from the movie 'The Rock' where he's handling VX nerve gas and looks Sean Connery in the face and says "The second you don't respect this, it kills you". Which pretty much holds true for handling enriched nuclear material. Kind or terrifying.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  isn't that the film MI6 based their fake iraq WMDs dossier on
  - eru 4y ago
    'The Rock' came out in 1996. Which dossier are you talking about?
    - gs17 4y ago
      2002 according to https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obvious-bullshit-the-rock-writer-shocked-film-may-have-inspired-false-wmd-intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obv...
      - eru 4y ago
        Oh, I misread _dain_'s comment. I thought they said The Rock was based on the dossier. Obviously, they meant it the other way round. I remember the official reasons for attacking Iraq back then being obvious bullshit. But that might have just been a function of living in Germany where the media was against the war (because the German public was a against the war), so the media would give that impression anyway.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Yes, Hans Blix, the UN inspector who visited the supposed labs well before the invasion, openly reported it was all bullshit. Even the New York Times, which was a huge invasion booster, ran that story. On page 18. Never forget, Thomas Friedman was the most rabid invasion advocate at the NYT. Never doubt that all of these people, and Colin Powell, knew all about Hans Blix's reports.
moron4hire 4y ago
So, has the management at Los Alamos been replaced? That's clearly the cause of the problem. It's been 5 years now. What's happened?
- petschge 4y ago
  Yes actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory#Contract_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory...
soared 4y ago
The US has an interesting history of poor safety around nuclear related facilities. Not far from Denver is a great example with some interesting history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant#:~:text=The%20Rocky%20Flats%20Plant%20was,be%20assembled%20into%20nuclear%20weapons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant#:~:text=Th....
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Looks like Rockwell was fined a little bit, and nobody was actually tried despite a Grand Jury identifying several people who should have been. One guy responsible got cancer.
anonu 4y ago
Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  It's only fissile material that behaves this way, not all radioactive material. The supercritical state must be reached very quickly (with explosives) to get city-destroying power levels out of a few kilograms of plutonium. But getting enough power out of a few kg of supercritical plutonium to kill someone standing nearby is easy to do even accidentally.
- kragen 4y ago
  Nope, the conventional explosive is just there to keep the chain reaction from blowing the critical mass far enough apart to stop itself. Nuclear reactors do not use conventional explosives, as you probably knew.
- ars 4y ago
  To make it explode you are correct, you need to bring a lot of material together very fast. This explains the difference between the two types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_criticality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_criticality
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    You can get an explosion without. (Cf. Chernobyl and Fukushima.) Just not the mushroom cloud.
- danielodievich 4y ago
  You can start critical chain reaction with your hands holding a bit of Pu each, by bringing them together. What you get with implosion is keeping that chain reaction going for a ~hundred generations exponentially cracking atoms so it goes all kabloey.
- credit_guy 4y ago
kragen 4y ago
The BLS says: > There were 4,764 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2020, a 10.7-percent decrease from 5,333 in 2019. We should diligently work to reduce work injuries, especially fatal ones. It appears that LANL is a safer workplace than average and its three criticality-accident fatalities in 80 years are not a significant contributor to its overall workplace accident risk. However, it sounds like the lab's safety staff left en masse because they felt they didn't the power to make changes to improve things. That suggests that too much power rests with management and not enough with rank-and-file workers, and that is a situation that tends to result in safety risks, because those fall disproportionately on rank-and-file workers in every workplace.`
- bombcar 4y ago
  A safety incident that results in the unsafe worker or someone with him dying is usually considered a regrettable occurrence. A safety issue that could irradiate a portion of the city is a bit higher. Same reason we investigate air and rail incidents much more than we investigate most car crashes.
  - kragen 4y ago
    It's true, but the risk of that is fairly small. There were 60 publicly disclosed criticality accidents from 01945 to 01999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc... causing a total of 21 deaths, though for some reason that list doesn't include Chernobyl, which killed 31 people directly and about 6000 people over the years. But you aren't going to get a Chernobyl-style disaster from a criticality accident in a glovebox; Chernobyl happened inside a containment vessel that harnessed 3 gigawatts of thermal energy in normal operation, along with massive quantities of graphite moderator which caught fire and distributed radioactive material all across Europe. Also, Los Alamos has a population of 13'200; the nearest city is 93 km away with about 930'000. Those people are very important but evacuating Los Alamos would not be nearly as difficult as evaluating Pripyat (population 49'360) — unless strict official controls on information dissemination delayed the news until it was too late, anyway. Basically I think people are worried about nuclear fuel processing not because of its real dangers (which are significant but of a smaller order of magnitude than the dangers of fertilizer shipping, pesticide manufacture, and inadequate building codes in earthquake zones) but because of a well-justified belief that the government lies about them, along with the well-documented fact that nuclear energy was originally developed for mass killing.
bb88 4y ago
The joke about nuclear reactors and nuclear labs is that Homer Simpson works at one. I would feel better about nuclear technology if it didn't keep showing up as a potential story for The Simpsons to use.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> 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. > When this exodus was in turn noticed in Washington, officials there concluded the privately-run lab was not adequately protecting its workers from a radiation disaster. Excellent response from those engineers.
hit8run 4y ago
Maybe just stop building nuclear weapons!? The last thing the world needs is more of this shit.
- p_l 4y ago
  The kind of operation involved in PF-4 isn't only for manufacturing nuclear weapons, but also all kind of scientific works as well as dismantling warheads or turning plutonium into fuel for peaceful use.
- femto113 4y ago
  LANL's plutonium facility is also the only place that can safely dismantle the nuclear weapons that already exist.
- phdelightful 4y ago
  Nice idea, but our current world except without US nukes is a much worse world. We’re sort of stuck in a local minimum of nuclear weapon danger for the time being. Also I think the main accident in the article was during research into converting enriched uranium for civilian use.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  That would be great, but only if you could get everyone else in the world to also stop and destroy the ones they have.
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  If we had a magic wand to make them disappear, Id wave it. And as more countries get it, 10 and counting, we're guaranteed to have an exchange at some point. The exchange will at best break the taboo on using nuclear weapons. Or it could lead to a global exchange. And it only makes sense to get acquire them. Not getting them, or giving up a nuclear project, is dumb geopolitics. But we dont have a magic wand. So should the US (or any large power) unilaterally give them up? Of course not! Thats incredibly stupid because the other super power would trample on you. Should the super powers agree to give them up? It was tried, it failed miserably. Besides, you cant get the top N nuclear powers to give them up because then the N+1 power now is the world's eminent super power. Even if you got all ten to agree to give them up, nukes aren't that hard for a semi modern state to acquire. Pakistan and N. Korea have them! 1970s India acquired them. That an eleventh country (out of the 50-60 or so that could build one) will acquire them is basically guaranteed. The list of countries that are turn key capable or renounced a probably successful program is very long. So no. We're stuck with them. And we'll probably end the world because of them. On the bright side, global warming is a much smaller concern once you accept this.
foobarbecue 4y ago
Any updates on this? How have they been doing since 2017?
tamaharbor 4y ago
I hope they posted their MSD sheets.
code_duck 4y ago
My favorite nuclear disaster! Criticality events. I lived in Los Alamos for a while. I looked into renting a studio space. I became curious about the property across the street from my prospective rental which was surrounded by a chain link fence with green canvas. I researched and learned it was the site of an original Manhattan site waste dump which had, a few years prior, been enclosed with a negative pressure tent and cleaned up at a cost of 2-3 billion. Apparently the government had dumped an unknown quantity of high level nuclear waste there in an unlined pit in the dirt in the 40s. This led me to research the history of the area. After a couple of months I figured out that my house in White Rock was about 3/4 of a mile from the current waste dump for the entire lab, known as TA-53 or MDA-C or something. They were in the process of excavating the three 200 foot deep pits of MDA-C - one for low level nuclear waste, one for transuranic (as they call “high level” these days) and one for classified waste. If I stood on my roof I could see the negative pressure tents surrounding them. My favorite non-classified project which was disposed of there was the “experimental high temperature plutonium reactor”, from the 90s. The lab has some rather interesting history. There was no concept at all of safely disposing of anything or even recording what they dumped and where until the 60s. The first ever radioactive metal working facility, out on a ridge by the entrance to town (TA 21? 23?) dumped all of their wastewater directly into the canyon untreated. This has recently been cleaned up at a cost of several billion dollars also, and now they are building homes there. The heavy/radioactive metal plumes went down into the earth over 500 feet. In fact, all of the waste from the entire lab used to be dumped into a stream in the middle of town. They cleaned it up, opened it as a park (“Acid Canyon”), then after heavy rains found some barrels they missed which were determined to contain plutonium waste. Oops, cleaned that up some more and now it’s a nature preserve and hiking area. There are still untouched facilities from the 50s where Feynman worked on polonium experiments sitting a few hundred feet from the banks of the Rio Grande. There was a power plant right on the edge of a native reservation neighboring the lab. According to the federal government, the plume of chromium contamination it left ends exactly on the property line of the lab to the reservation. Everyone I met in Los Alamos had zero concerns about pollution having an impact on them.
- code_duck 4y ago
  Looking into this, I have most of the names wrong. For anyone interested this site is a decent guide to the basics: https://n3b-la.com/mda/ https://n3b-la.com/mda/
thret 4y ago
Reading what happened to Ouchi makes me think two things: 1. Anyone who has not gotten that far, skip the "Ghastly deaths after the blue glow" part. 2. Euthanasia for someone exposed to lethal radiation should be the recommended treatment. Give the patient a choice, but also the option.
- Nekhrimah 4y ago
  > Euthanasia for someone exposed to lethal radiation should be the recommended treatment. That was my thinking too. The poster child for humane avoidance of suffering.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    It's darkly ironic that we'll "humanely" euthanize animals in pain without question, but the "humane" option is often unavailable to actual humans.
    - Tangurena2 4y ago
      The rationale for this is the belief that only humans have "souls" and that no animal has one. Suffering seems to be a requirement of Christianity (for an example, see Book of Job).
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
It was just a prank bro!
quickthrower2 4y ago
These people really need a desert and some robots.
floatinglotus 4y ago
It’s a little strange that there is a Sharpie in the photo. It would make it better with a bunch of post it notes and one of those Apple mice upside down and connected to a USB cord.
julienreszka 4y ago
People's appetite for risk has always been very variable. Too much appetite is dangerous but too little just gets people nowhere because sacred shitless they do nothing. Just like during war you can only be bothered by bombs falling on your town and risking to destroy your home for so long. Eventually people get used to the risk as a way to stay sane. I'm not certain what's the right way to do it but this has to be taken into account.
chasd00 4y ago
It’s amazing how benign the rods look. Like if you found one of those on the ground and picked it up you’d have no idea it was killing you until it was too late.
abudabi123 4y ago
You can have your cake and eat it. In place of "Bubba" Google's DeepMind can operate the site safety by A.I. supervision and guidance, and Tesla Optimus bots can work to rule as if they are on Mars but are actually in the dangerous labs and the workplan has been checked thoroughly well before. Investors behind Alphabet and Tesla get a profitable payoff for realising a better world as God intends. Workers get to go home to their families. The U.S. Navy lost LHD-6 to fire two years ago, the culture of safety is unevenly spread.
maybelsyrup 4y ago
> undermined the nation's ability to fabricate the cores of new nuclear weapons Uh, good.
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  Yeah, it seems like we don't deserve this anymore. We can't even follow simple safety rules with the raw stuff, how do we expect we can be responsible with the weapons themselves?
phendrenad2 4y ago
God, nukes and everything about them is terrifying. I'm sure people working at plants that make conventional explosives aren't exposed to such risks, not even close. I think that we lack the technology to make such things safely. It's unfortunate that robotics is such a failed science, because no one should be handling anything remotely close to criticality with rubber gloves. It's 2022 but when it comes to our ability to protect against nuclear accidents it's still 1942.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > I'm sure people working at plants that make conventional explosives aren't exposed to such risks, not even close. I'd expect the opposite tbh. More dangerous dust inhalation in the explosives plant.
ncmncm 4y ago
>... tested to see if they remain safe and reliable for use in the nuclear stockpile. Note here this expression "safe and reliable", taken from the DoE's founding legislation, is officially re-interpreted to be very, very different from what a normal person would conclude. Most particularly, "safety" doesn't mean anything about risks to the public or to people handling equipment and materials. It does not mean anything about them not exploding in their warehouse or while hanging in a bomber. It does not mean protecting against release of radioactive materials or contamination of groundwater or ecosystems. It does not mean keeping people from stealing plutonium or whole weapons. It does not mean keeping bombs from falling out of planes at random (which has happened), or from crews setting them off accidentally or on purpose. It does not mean keeping bombers loaded with them from crashing or missiles with them on top from exploding in their silos (which have both happened). The only responsibility "safety" places on the DoE is ensuring that, when the button is pushed, the bomb really does go boom. "Reliability", meanwhile, means only that the boom is as big as it says in the specs. It probably requires legislation to change these re-interpretations.
- csours 4y ago
  Always/Never Always explode when we desire it/Never explode when we don't desire it.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    "Never" is outside the scope of "safety". Just Always.
  - Tangurena2 4y ago
    You might want to watch the documentary of the same name by Sandia National Labs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrht4F8xiS4AY-oLvCq77aA https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrht4F8xiS4... About 2.5 hours (after sanitizing still-classified material). What has to be done to make it work "exactly when we want it to go boom" and also "never when we don't want it to go boom" is fascinating. Some of the other videos from Sandia and Lawrence Livermore are fascinating. One was about "well, how do you generate truly random numbers without leaking those numbers" (the random numbers used as crypto-keys in permissive action links), the answer turned out to be of the order of "use the radioactive decay from inside the warhead itself".
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
This sounds like the plot of an episode of the Simpsons
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
The 2011 incident, together with a reported loss of plutonium at Los Alamos [1], lead to the privatization of at least the Sandia Labs. (Bechtel has ownership of Livermore, for example [2].) When I last looked into this–having been surprised to see the tour buses at Livermore bearing LLC identifiers, government sites don't usually have those--there was something about the lost plutonium having been an accounting issue versus physical misplacement. I don't see that on Wikipedia anymore, so not sure. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/LOS-ALAMOS-Plutonium-could-be-missing-from-lab-2591846.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/LOS-ALAMOS-Plutonium-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_Laboratory#Renaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_La...
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  > lead to the privatization of at least the Sandia Labs If you're talking about management, the Sandia Labs have have always been private. From 1948 to the 1990s they were run by AT&T. After that it was Lockheed-Martin and now NTESS. But the facility itself is owned by the US government, as are all the National Labs. The model is called GOCO (Government-Owned/Contractor Operated). The article you're referring to is about a spinoff facility.
drawingthesun 4y ago
Why is the only lab that can make new cores for America's nukes privately owned? Honestly this is utter madness. Surely one of the most critical core components of America's entire nuclear deterrent should be government owned and run? What am I missing?
- buescher 4y ago
  "Privately-run" is not "privately-owned", and it might be a bit misleading. The DOE hires government contractors to run its laboratories.
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  All (but one) of the national engineering labs are joint ventures. Owned by DoE, operated/managed by some university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Energy_national_laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_En... I used to work at NREL.
yummypaint 4y ago
I know several physicists at los alamos and i can only conclude that the "manufacturing" parts of the lab have a very different safety culture than the "science" parts of the lab. Researchers at los alamos love coming to university accelerators to do work because they can actually get things done (Even things as simple as using a ladder involve beurocracy at national labs). The same kinds of criticality experiments that famously killed people in the past are essentially unrecognizable as far as interlocks and procedures are concerned. From reading the article you would think it's the wild west out there, but it actually has one of the most rigidly enforced safety cultures i know of among scientists. Being categorically prohibited from using machine tools as a scientist, for instance, is one of the things keeping me away from working there (if you need something made it goes into queue and machinists get to it on their own time). It wouldn't be surprising if the people actually manufacturing pits etc are effectively employees of a different organization.
mikewarot 4y ago
Because of the nature of criticality, no amount of traditional "training" or additional bureaucracy/procedures can fix this problem, it requires a new approach to give an much better intuition of the dangers, PLUS some new safety gear that is always giving feedback to the wearer when things go bad, along with networking/surveillance. First - They need a VR/AR training system that shows danger levels visually, audibly, and via any other sense that make the user instinctively aware of what they're getting themselves into. In training, they should go through all the ways you can die, just like pilots do in simulators. Second - There needs to be new safety gear that is an interactive, networked, set of sensors to detect radiation all the way from alpha through fast neutrons, and gives immediate feedback anytime things start to go south to the user. It should also warn everyone immediately in a criticality event. Think of it like you would the explosive gas detectors that coal miners use, but more powerful/integrated into the network. There should be very strict rules about the access of the data gathered, to ensure people feel it won't be abused for normal office politics, etc. Third - A management system that catches the failures in safety, and discusses them, and a rate of zero failures/year is obviously unobtainable, and should also be unacceptable. There are always mistakes, they need to be caught. Fourth - Everyone who works in criticality related materials should be required to have a will, advanced medical directives, and recorded preferences about euthanasia signed and witnessed, to stress the ultimate danger. Fifth - Psych screenings (One would hope they do this, but probably not) Sixth - Review these things every 5 years.
iancmceachern 4y ago
Oppenheimer is rolling in his grave

Some people say suicide is never justified, but I don't believe people who say such things comprehend the horrors of acute radiation poisoning.

jonstewart 4y ago
That was my reaction reading about the accident in Japan. Anyone who gets a guaranteed lethal dose of radiation like that should be given a large mercy dose of morphine to kill them so they don't have to endure their skin falling off. It seems inhumane to keep someone on life support in such cases.

crooked-v 4y ago

So I guess it turns out that Homer Simpson was more realistic than we thought... all the way through to only avoiding nuclear accidents through sheer luck.

surement 4y ago
the book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser highlights many closer calls than this and is very good reading, if a bit disconcerting
fragmede 4y ago
If by avoided you mean physicists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin dying from acute radiation syndrome (Demon Core), then yeah.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Homer is safer. He chucks a single rod out on the street in the opening scene, keeping it separate from the rest. At work he is lazy, so by doing nothing, he is not combining rods together.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >At work he is lazy, so by doing nothing, he is not combining rods together. And whenever he is required to do something, disaster occurs. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwV24Bskyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwV24Bskyw>
  - Tangurena2 4y ago
    Like Y2k remediation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWPdBhlsBYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWPdBhlsBYI
tragomaskhalos 4y ago
More Simpsons prescience: I believe it is Lenny who observes, when Homer is running for the office of town garbage collection supremo, "Eh, Homer's a great nuclear safety technician, but I don't know if I trust him with my garbage".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

CobaltFire 4y ago

Putting a profit motive anywhere near anything that is safety critical is almost never a good idea. Naval Nuclear Power has it's issues, yet it is so safe that we have almost no incidents. That's because things like this don't happen there due to the culture of safety. That said, this is about production rather than operation, but the overall communities are relatively small and aligned.

eru 4y ago
> Putting a profit motive anywhere near anything that is safety critical is almost never a good idea. Why? And exactly how do you mean that? Is the safety track record of private industry worse than that of eg non-profit or state owned industry.
- Retric 4y ago
  It’s hard to do a direct comparison as government jobs tend to inherently be more risky and accident reporting rates vary. An Air Force pilot isn’t directly analogous to an airline pilot nor is a police officer even vaguely equivalent to private security. Private sector hospitals, which are arguably the closest direct analog with public sector counterparts, have higher rates of workplace injury than public sector hospitals. By comparison private teachers have lower rates, but work with less at risk populations etc. PS: Reports of illness are noticeably higher in the public sector, but that likely relates to differences in PTO etc.
  - eru 4y ago
    Thanks. I was more thinking of industrial accidents, for example. In any case, when given the right incentives, profit seeking companies are excellent at promoting safety. Similarly, bureaucrats working for organisations without a profit-motive don't magically follow the same preferences we might dream up in our armchairs. They also need to be given the right incentives.
    - redanddead 4y ago

Arainach 4y ago

The photo didn't shut things down. A culture of disregard for safety over years, and a failure by management to take the issue seriously, shut down the lab.

xattt 4y ago
You’re right, but eyeballs want to peek at plutonium and secretly want to see the stuff glow as green rods.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I admit it's alluring. It's just a chunk of greyish metal, how dangerous could it be? Radioactivity is already a mysterious and fascinating and alluring phenomenon, and somehow radioactive things not looking particularly dangerous only adds to that effect. There's something strange about ionizing radiation: it's extremely dangerous, yet we have never evolved the ability to detect it and have no intuition for it.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > never evolved the ability to detect it How much of a problem was it before we started mining uranium and putting it into glass? That was only 100-200 years ago, I think?
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      There was a natural nuclear reactor in Gabon. But that was 2 billion years ago. It ran for long enough that a microbe evolved to harvest the radiation to use in place of regular chemical energy sources. Which still exists.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Hasn't there always been a risk of radon appearing in basements and groundwater? Regardless, it's clear that radiation was not enough of an evolutionary "problem" for our bodies to evolve to cope with it, beyond whatever we get from the sun. But that's just the thing! We are so used to our bodies mostly doing the right thing in response to various dangers: bitter is poison, cold is frostbite/hypothermia, burning pain is fire/burns, nausea/disgust is disease, thirst is dehydration, etc. Ionizing radiation is weird because it literally destroys our tissues, but does so indirectly by destroying our DNA (as far as I understand anyway), but we never had any evolutionary reason to be able to "feel" our DNA being destroyed, so we evolved neither the ability to detect it happening nor the ability to see or detect radiation in the environment. I suspect that many industrial chemicals and poisons in a similar category, e.g. many poisons are either neutral or sweet-smelling/tasting. But radiation is especially weird and scary because it's such an unfamiliar phenomenon to begin with, unlike poison which most humans seems to understand instinctively.

wisnoskij 4y ago

They keep saying that profit seeking was the issue, but taking selfies with plutonium, running a lab for 4 years that produces nothing, and not having any employees that don't understand the most basics of nuclear physics does not sound like profit seeking. It sounds like someone just has way too much money and runs a nuclear weapons lab as vanity project.

xeromal 4y ago
In the article, it looks like the public workers before the buyout were also careless so it sounds like people who work around dangerous plutonium just become careless over time.
heavyset_go 4y ago
If you continued to read the article, you'd see that there was a culture of throwing caution to the wind to increase productivity at not only that lab, but other nuclear facilities around the world. Hell, the article even went on to say that workers at the facility even came up with a euphemism for orders that ignored basic safety protocols, they called them "Bubba said" orders. And the article said that after those criticality events, those in charge of the facility and safety of personnel just had people keep working instead of evacuating.
- ars 4y ago
  > And the article said that after those criticality events, those in charge of the facility and safety of personnel just had people keep working instead of evacuating. And how exactly did they convince those employees to keep working? The employees are not making extra for not following rules, do people really just not care about their lives? (I don't for a second believe someone working in a nuclear lab would be unaware of criticality, so ignorance can't be the explanation.)
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    There is a very gung ho culture in labs about safety. It slows you down to do things right and when it comes to reviews the cowboys (and girls) who do things wrong but fast get better reviews because they get more done. Nuclear labs kill the people inside them at worst. Bio labs ... Well there's a reason why I think covid was the worst lab accident in human history.

nimbius 4y ago

brought to you by the guys who learned nothing from a string of criticality accidents. I'm not surprised. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

ineedasername 4y ago

I would have though the decision tree for placement of concentrated plutonium was firmly established after the demon core incidents, set roughly in stone as the following: Should I bring high purity plutonium samples together? | V Do you want to die a horrible radiated death taught in textbooks for decades? | | V V No. Yes | | V V Then don’t you’re fired. It seems like Los Alamos may be in need of a fresh printout of the above & a photocopier + stapler to adhere a copy to the foreheads of all of their technicians.

bitL 4y ago
Fired or fried?
- toss1 4y ago
  plausibly both
- ineedasername 4y ago
  That would depend on whether they read the flow chart before or after coming to a decision. But I think it would almost always be an either/or, not both: It would seem a little unethical to fire someone after they fried themselves & thereby performed a great service, making the next generation of techs much more likely to keep themselves both in the gene pool & lifelong contributors to scientific knowledge through their career. Consider those fried persons & object lessons to be sort of the “Leeroy Jenkins” of their profession.
  - Crespyl 4y ago
    At least they got chicken?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bmc7505 4y ago
Your flowchart neglects to mention the potential upside: Do you want to experience the results of runaway nuclear chain reaction firsthand? Become a Wikipedia entry? Impress the labmates with your prowess at tickling the dragon's tail?

gonzo41 4y ago

There's a great Nicholas cage quote from the movie 'The Rock' where he's handling VX nerve gas and looks Sean Connery in the face and says "The second you don't respect this, it kills you". Which pretty much holds true for handling enriched nuclear material. Kind or terrifying.

_dain_ 4y ago
isn't that the film MI6 based their fake iraq WMDs dossier on
- eru 4y ago
  'The Rock' came out in 1996. Which dossier are you talking about?
  - gs17 4y ago
    2002 according to https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obvious-bullshit-the-rock-writer-shocked-film-may-have-inspired-false-wmd-intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obv...
    - eru 4y ago
      Oh, I misread _dain_'s comment. I thought they said The Rock was based on the dossier. Obviously, they meant it the other way round. I remember the official reasons for attacking Iraq back then being obvious bullshit. But that might have just been a function of living in Germany where the media was against the war (because the German public was a against the war), so the media would give that impression anyway.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Yes, Hans Blix, the UN inspector who visited the supposed labs well before the invasion, openly reported it was all bullshit. Even the New York Times, which was a huge invasion booster, ran that story. On page 18. Never forget, Thomas Friedman was the most rabid invasion advocate at the NYT. Never doubt that all of these people, and Colin Powell, knew all about Hans Blix's reports.

moron4hire 4y ago

So, has the management at Los Alamos been replaced? That's clearly the cause of the problem. It's been 5 years now. What's happened?

petschge 4y ago
Yes actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory#Contract_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory...

soared 4y ago

The US has an interesting history of poor safety around nuclear related facilities. Not far from Denver is a great example with some interesting history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant#:~:text=The%20Rocky%20Flats%20Plant%20was,be%20assembled%20into%20nuclear%20weapons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant#:~:text=Th....

ncmncm 4y ago
Looks like Rockwell was fined a little bit, and nobody was actually tried despite a Grand Jury identifying several people who should have been. One guy responsible got cancer.

anonu 4y ago

Today I learned: don't bring radioactive material close together... I know about criticality. But I always thought you needed a conventional explosive to kickstart the chain reaction.

philipkglass 4y ago
It's only fissile material that behaves this way, not all radioactive material. The supercritical state must be reached very quickly (with explosives) to get city-destroying power levels out of a few kilograms of plutonium. But getting enough power out of a few kg of supercritical plutonium to kill someone standing nearby is easy to do even accidentally.
kragen 4y ago
Nope, the conventional explosive is just there to keep the chain reaction from blowing the critical mass far enough apart to stop itself. Nuclear reactors do not use conventional explosives, as you probably knew.
ars 4y ago
To make it explode you are correct, you need to bring a lot of material together very fast. This explains the difference between the two types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_criticality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_criticality
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You can get an explosion without. (Cf. Chernobyl and Fukushima.) Just not the mushroom cloud.
danielodievich 4y ago
You can start critical chain reaction with your hands holding a bit of Pu each, by bringing them together. What you get with implosion is keeping that chain reaction going for a ~hundred generations exponentially cracking atoms so it goes all kabloey.
credit_guy 4y ago

kragen 4y ago

The BLS says: > There were 4,764 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2020, a 10.7-percent decrease from 5,333 in 2019. We should diligently work to reduce work injuries, especially fatal ones. It appears that LANL is a safer workplace than average and its three criticality-accident fatalities in 80 years are not a significant contributor to its overall workplace accident risk. However, it sounds like the lab's safety staff left en masse because they felt they didn't the power to make changes to improve things. That suggests that too much power rests with management and not enough with rank-and-file workers, and that is a situation that tends to result in safety risks, because those fall disproportionately on rank-and-file workers in every workplace.`

bombcar 4y ago
A safety incident that results in the unsafe worker or someone with him dying is usually considered a regrettable occurrence. A safety issue that could irradiate a portion of the city is a bit higher. Same reason we investigate air and rail incidents much more than we investigate most car crashes.
- kragen 4y ago
  It's true, but the risk of that is fairly small. There were 60 publicly disclosed criticality accidents from 01945 to 01999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Known_inc... causing a total of 21 deaths, though for some reason that list doesn't include Chernobyl, which killed 31 people directly and about 6000 people over the years. But you aren't going to get a Chernobyl-style disaster from a criticality accident in a glovebox; Chernobyl happened inside a containment vessel that harnessed 3 gigawatts of thermal energy in normal operation, along with massive quantities of graphite moderator which caught fire and distributed radioactive material all across Europe. Also, Los Alamos has a population of 13'200; the nearest city is 93 km away with about 930'000. Those people are very important but evacuating Los Alamos would not be nearly as difficult as evaluating Pripyat (population 49'360) — unless strict official controls on information dissemination delayed the news until it was too late, anyway. Basically I think people are worried about nuclear fuel processing not because of its real dangers (which are significant but of a smaller order of magnitude than the dangers of fertilizer shipping, pesticide manufacture, and inadequate building codes in earthquake zones) but because of a well-justified belief that the government lies about them, along with the well-documented fact that nuclear energy was originally developed for mass killing.

bb88 4y ago

The joke about nuclear reactors and nuclear labs is that Homer Simpson works at one. I would feel better about nuclear technology if it didn't keep showing up as a potential story for The Simpsons to use.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> 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. > When this exodus was in turn noticed in Washington, officials there concluded the privately-run lab was not adequately protecting its workers from a radiation disaster. Excellent response from those engineers.

hit8run 4y ago

Maybe just stop building nuclear weapons!? The last thing the world needs is more of this shit.

p_l 4y ago
The kind of operation involved in PF-4 isn't only for manufacturing nuclear weapons, but also all kind of scientific works as well as dismantling warheads or turning plutonium into fuel for peaceful use.
femto113 4y ago
LANL's plutonium facility is also the only place that can safely dismantle the nuclear weapons that already exist.
phdelightful 4y ago
Nice idea, but our current world except without US nukes is a much worse world. We’re sort of stuck in a local minimum of nuclear weapon danger for the time being. Also I think the main accident in the article was during research into converting enriched uranium for civilian use.
midoridensha 4y ago
That would be great, but only if you could get everyone else in the world to also stop and destroy the ones they have.
sbaiddn 4y ago
If we had a magic wand to make them disappear, Id wave it. And as more countries get it, 10 and counting, we're guaranteed to have an exchange at some point. The exchange will at best break the taboo on using nuclear weapons. Or it could lead to a global exchange. And it only makes sense to get acquire them. Not getting them, or giving up a nuclear project, is dumb geopolitics. But we dont have a magic wand. So should the US (or any large power) unilaterally give them up? Of course not! Thats incredibly stupid because the other super power would trample on you. Should the super powers agree to give them up? It was tried, it failed miserably. Besides, you cant get the top N nuclear powers to give them up because then the N+1 power now is the world's eminent super power. Even if you got all ten to agree to give them up, nukes aren't that hard for a semi modern state to acquire. Pakistan and N. Korea have them! 1970s India acquired them. That an eleventh country (out of the 50-60 or so that could build one) will acquire them is basically guaranteed. The list of countries that are turn key capable or renounced a probably successful program is very long. So no. We're stuck with them. And we'll probably end the world because of them. On the bright side, global warming is a much smaller concern once you accept this.

foobarbecue 4y ago

Any updates on this? How have they been doing since 2017?

tamaharbor 4y ago

I hope they posted their MSD sheets.

code_duck 4y ago

My favorite nuclear disaster! Criticality events. I lived in Los Alamos for a while. I looked into renting a studio space. I became curious about the property across the street from my prospective rental which was surrounded by a chain link fence with green canvas. I researched and learned it was the site of an original Manhattan site waste dump which had, a few years prior, been enclosed with a negative pressure tent and cleaned up at a cost of 2-3 billion. Apparently the government had dumped an unknown quantity of high level nuclear waste there in an unlined pit in the dirt in the 40s. This led me to research the history of the area. After a couple of months I figured out that my house in White Rock was about 3/4 of a mile from the current waste dump for the entire lab, known as TA-53 or MDA-C or something. They were in the process of excavating the three 200 foot deep pits of MDA-C - one for low level nuclear waste, one for transuranic (as they call “high level” these days) and one for classified waste. If I stood on my roof I could see the negative pressure tents surrounding them. My favorite non-classified project which was disposed of there was the “experimental high temperature plutonium reactor”, from the 90s. The lab has some rather interesting history. There was no concept at all of safely disposing of anything or even recording what they dumped and where until the 60s. The first ever radioactive metal working facility, out on a ridge by the entrance to town (TA 21? 23?) dumped all of their wastewater directly into the canyon untreated. This has recently been cleaned up at a cost of several billion dollars also, and now they are building homes there. The heavy/radioactive metal plumes went down into the earth over 500 feet. In fact, all of the waste from the entire lab used to be dumped into a stream in the middle of town. They cleaned it up, opened it as a park (“Acid Canyon”), then after heavy rains found some barrels they missed which were determined to contain plutonium waste. Oops, cleaned that up some more and now it’s a nature preserve and hiking area. There are still untouched facilities from the 50s where Feynman worked on polonium experiments sitting a few hundred feet from the banks of the Rio Grande. There was a power plant right on the edge of a native reservation neighboring the lab. According to the federal government, the plume of chromium contamination it left ends exactly on the property line of the lab to the reservation. Everyone I met in Los Alamos had zero concerns about pollution having an impact on them.

code_duck 4y ago
Looking into this, I have most of the names wrong. For anyone interested this site is a decent guide to the basics: https://n3b-la.com/mda/ https://n3b-la.com/mda/

thret 4y ago

Reading what happened to Ouchi makes me think two things: 1. Anyone who has not gotten that far, skip the "Ghastly deaths after the blue glow" part. 2. Euthanasia for someone exposed to lethal radiation should be the recommended treatment. Give the patient a choice, but also the option.

Nekhrimah 4y ago
> Euthanasia for someone exposed to lethal radiation should be the recommended treatment. That was my thinking too. The poster child for humane avoidance of suffering.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  It's darkly ironic that we'll "humanely" euthanize animals in pain without question, but the "humane" option is often unavailable to actual humans.
  - Tangurena2 4y ago
    The rationale for this is the belief that only humans have "souls" and that no animal has one. Suffering seems to be a requirement of Christianity (for an example, see Book of Job).

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

It was just a prank bro!

quickthrower2 4y ago

These people really need a desert and some robots.

floatinglotus 4y ago

It’s a little strange that there is a Sharpie in the photo. It would make it better with a bunch of post it notes and one of those Apple mice upside down and connected to a USB cord.

julienreszka 4y ago

People's appetite for risk has always been very variable. Too much appetite is dangerous but too little just gets people nowhere because sacred shitless they do nothing. Just like during war you can only be bothered by bombs falling on your town and risking to destroy your home for so long. Eventually people get used to the risk as a way to stay sane. I'm not certain what's the right way to do it but this has to be taken into account.

chasd00 4y ago

It’s amazing how benign the rods look. Like if you found one of those on the ground and picked it up you’d have no idea it was killing you until it was too late.

abudabi123 4y ago

You can have your cake and eat it. In place of "Bubba" Google's DeepMind can operate the site safety by A.I. supervision and guidance, and Tesla Optimus bots can work to rule as if they are on Mars but are actually in the dangerous labs and the workplan has been checked thoroughly well before. Investors behind Alphabet and Tesla get a profitable payoff for realising a better world as God intends. Workers get to go home to their families. The U.S. Navy lost LHD-6 to fire two years ago, the culture of safety is unevenly spread.

maybelsyrup 4y ago

> undermined the nation's ability to fabricate the cores of new nuclear weapons Uh, good.

iancmceachern 4y ago
Yeah, it seems like we don't deserve this anymore. We can't even follow simple safety rules with the raw stuff, how do we expect we can be responsible with the weapons themselves?

phendrenad2 4y ago

God, nukes and everything about them is terrifying. I'm sure people working at plants that make conventional explosives aren't exposed to such risks, not even close. I think that we lack the technology to make such things safely. It's unfortunate that robotics is such a failed science, because no one should be handling anything remotely close to criticality with rubber gloves. It's 2022 but when it comes to our ability to protect against nuclear accidents it's still 1942.

concordDance 4y ago
> I'm sure people working at plants that make conventional explosives aren't exposed to such risks, not even close. I'd expect the opposite tbh. More dangerous dust inhalation in the explosives plant.

ncmncm 4y ago

>... tested to see if they remain safe and reliable for use in the nuclear stockpile. Note here this expression "safe and reliable", taken from the DoE's founding legislation, is officially re-interpreted to be very, very different from what a normal person would conclude. Most particularly, "safety" doesn't mean anything about risks to the public or to people handling equipment and materials. It does not mean anything about them not exploding in their warehouse or while hanging in a bomber. It does not mean protecting against release of radioactive materials or contamination of groundwater or ecosystems. It does not mean keeping people from stealing plutonium or whole weapons. It does not mean keeping bombs from falling out of planes at random (which has happened), or from crews setting them off accidentally or on purpose. It does not mean keeping bombers loaded with them from crashing or missiles with them on top from exploding in their silos (which have both happened). The only responsibility "safety" places on the DoE is ensuring that, when the button is pushed, the bomb really does go boom. "Reliability", meanwhile, means only that the boom is as big as it says in the specs. It probably requires legislation to change these re-interpretations.

csours 4y ago
Always/Never Always explode when we desire it/Never explode when we don't desire it.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  "Never" is outside the scope of "safety". Just Always.
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  You might want to watch the documentary of the same name by Sandia National Labs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrht4F8xiS4AY-oLvCq77aA https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLouetuxaIMDrht4F8xiS4... About 2.5 hours (after sanitizing still-classified material). What has to be done to make it work "exactly when we want it to go boom" and also "never when we don't want it to go boom" is fascinating. Some of the other videos from Sandia and Lawrence Livermore are fascinating. One was about "well, how do you generate truly random numbers without leaking those numbers" (the random numbers used as crypto-keys in permissive action links), the answer turned out to be of the order of "use the radioactive decay from inside the warhead itself".

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

This sounds like the plot of an episode of the Simpsons

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

The 2011 incident, together with a reported loss of plutonium at Los Alamos [1], lead to the privatization of at least the Sandia Labs. (Bechtel has ownership of Livermore, for example [2].) When I last looked into this–having been surprised to see the tour buses at Livermore bearing LLC identifiers, government sites don't usually have those--there was something about the lost plutonium having been an accounting issue versus physical misplacement. I don't see that on Wikipedia anymore, so not sure. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/LOS-ALAMOS-Plutonium-could-be-missing-from-lab-2591846.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/LOS-ALAMOS-Plutonium-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_Laboratory#Renaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_La...

dreamcompiler 4y ago
> lead to the privatization of at least the Sandia Labs If you're talking about management, the Sandia Labs have have always been private. From 1948 to the 1990s they were run by AT&T. After that it was Lockheed-Martin and now NTESS. But the facility itself is owned by the US government, as are all the National Labs. The model is called GOCO (Government-Owned/Contractor Operated). The article you're referring to is about a spinoff facility.

drawingthesun 4y ago

Why is the only lab that can make new cores for America's nukes privately owned? Honestly this is utter madness. Surely one of the most critical core components of America's entire nuclear deterrent should be government owned and run? What am I missing?

buescher 4y ago
"Privately-run" is not "privately-owned", and it might be a bit misleading. The DOE hires government contractors to run its laboratories.
Tangurena2 4y ago
All (but one) of the national engineering labs are joint ventures. Owned by DoE, operated/managed by some university. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Energy_national_laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_En... I used to work at NREL.

yummypaint 4y ago

I know several physicists at los alamos and i can only conclude that the "manufacturing" parts of the lab have a very different safety culture than the "science" parts of the lab. Researchers at los alamos love coming to university accelerators to do work because they can actually get things done (Even things as simple as using a ladder involve beurocracy at national labs). The same kinds of criticality experiments that famously killed people in the past are essentially unrecognizable as far as interlocks and procedures are concerned. From reading the article you would think it's the wild west out there, but it actually has one of the most rigidly enforced safety cultures i know of among scientists. Being categorically prohibited from using machine tools as a scientist, for instance, is one of the things keeping me away from working there (if you need something made it goes into queue and machinists get to it on their own time). It wouldn't be surprising if the people actually manufacturing pits etc are effectively employees of a different organization.

mikewarot 4y ago

Because of the nature of criticality, no amount of traditional "training" or additional bureaucracy/procedures can fix this problem, it requires a new approach to give an much better intuition of the dangers, PLUS some new safety gear that is always giving feedback to the wearer when things go bad, along with networking/surveillance. First - They need a VR/AR training system that shows danger levels visually, audibly, and via any other sense that make the user instinctively aware of what they're getting themselves into. In training, they should go through all the ways you can die, just like pilots do in simulators. Second - There needs to be new safety gear that is an interactive, networked, set of sensors to detect radiation all the way from alpha through fast neutrons, and gives immediate feedback anytime things start to go south to the user. It should also warn everyone immediately in a criticality event. Think of it like you would the explosive gas detectors that coal miners use, but more powerful/integrated into the network. There should be very strict rules about the access of the data gathered, to ensure people feel it won't be abused for normal office politics, etc. Third - A management system that catches the failures in safety, and discusses them, and a rate of zero failures/year is obviously unobtainable, and should also be unacceptable. There are always mistakes, they need to be caught. Fourth - Everyone who works in criticality related materials should be required to have a will, advanced medical directives, and recorded preferences about euthanasia signed and witnessed, to stress the ultimate danger. Fifth - Psych screenings (One would hope they do this, but probably not) Sixth - Review these things every 5 years.

iancmceachern 4y ago

Oppenheimer is rolling in his grave