* Los Alamos National Laboratory briefly
loses control of criticality experiment.
* LANL's tritium detectors found to be
inaccurate.
* Rocky Flats OK'd to prepare waste for
WIPP.
* Celebrate Earthday with CCNS on April
25, in Santa Fe Plaza.
* A software glitch combined with a
hardware failure caused a criticality experiment to go briefly
out of control at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL,) on
February 26. The mechanical engineer running the experiment from
another, nearby building, halted the experiment manually when
she and her crew, watching and listening on video and speakers,
observed that the joystick had failed, and that the motor driving
two sheets of uranium on Plexiglas plates toward one another had
speeded up instead of slowing down. None of the lab workers
received higher than normal dosages of radiation. Lab spokesmen
claim that, because of the materials involved, the experiment
could never have reached criticality, even if the crew had failed
to act.
Rick Anderson, leader of the lab's Advanced Nuclear
Technology group said that workers and the public were never in
any danger. But Anderson was worried by the fact that computers
controlling the assembly where the incident occurred should have
detected the chip failure in the joystick and stopped the
operation, but failed to do so. It turned out that, during a
switchover to a new computer system two or three years ago, a
programmer had disabled crucial fail-safe instructions in the
computer software. The programmer, said Anderson, had been
"counseled". The double error raised questions as to the
software safeguards against nuclear accident at the nation's only
facility for criticality experiments.
* This week scientists at LANL admitted that
tritium detection equipment, which should measure the amount of
tritium emissions in the air, has been underestimating the amount
by as much as a factor of three. Tritium, a radioactive isotope
of hydrogen, travels through the air as a part of water vapor.
During the summer months, the collectors at LANL were not
collecting the correct amount of water; as a result, the lab
missed much of the tritium it should have detected.
Craig Eberhart, an environmental scientist at LANL's Clean
Air Group said that he wasn't sure why the detectors did not
capture the correct amount of water vapor. Eberhart stated that
recalculating the radioactive dose for persons at the East Gate
brought the estimated dosage to 0.028 millirem. Previously the
lab claimed this was only 0.013 millirem, based on figures from
the faulty collectors. At Area G, the lab's radioactive waste
storage and disposal facility, where earlier calculations put the
dosage at 1.5 millirem, new figures show a dosage of 4.7
millirem, three times the original dose. The federal limit on
radioactive air emissions is 10 millirem per year for a member of
the public. The limit is higher for workers. Area G, which has
tritium contaminated waste, has the highest level of tritium
emissions at Los Alamos. The Environmental Protection Agency, New
Mexico Environment Department and Department of Energy have been
notified of the measuring error. Eberhart says that, using the
lab's high-quality meteorological data, it will be possible to
reconstruct faulty historical tritium emission levels.
* Rocky Flats nuclear plant outside Denver,
Colorado is now certified to prepare nuclear waste for shipment
to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New
Mexico, the Department of Energy, (DOE) announced on Tuesday,
April 7. The former Colorado nuclear weapons facility, which was
closed because of environmental contamination and nuclear safety
violations, has become the second DOE site to obtain WIPP
certification. Los Alamos National Laboratory was the first site
to be certified, in September 1997. Rocky Flats had been
preparing for certification since October 1995. The plant has
more than 6,000 drums of transuranic and transuranic mixed waste,
and officials said they expect to generate more that 30,000 more
drums during the site's cleanup. Over 200 drums of non-mixed
transuranic waste are ready now for shipment to the nuclear waste
repository in southern New Mexico. Earlier this month, the DOE's
Carlsbad Area Office told departing Energy Secretary Federico
Pe�a that WIPP is ready to open, but the project is still waiting
for approval from the Environmental Protection Agency.
* CCNS invites all of you to visit the
Santa Fe Plaza on Saturday, April 25, where we will join with
other environmental and community groups to celebrate Earth Day.
There will be a unparade, and booths of various organizations.
Volunteers who would like to help with the CCNS booth, please
call us at 986-1973. We hope to see all of you there.
