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As Others See It: Ensuring safety in nuclear weapons facilities is crucial

As Others See It: Ensuring safety in nuclear weapons facilities is crucial

An editorial from The Washington Post

The United States will need a secure and reliable force of nuclear weapons for a long time to come. But to maintain them in good form requires a sizable commitment of resources and brainpower: The nuclear weapons enterprise is a vast complex of laboratories and design and manufacturing facilities, relying on thousands of people who build and operate the planes, submarines and missiles, as well as care for the warheads. Nothing can be allowed to go wrong, but zero defects can hardly be taken for granted.

The story of a small but important laboratory at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is a case in point. Known as Plutonium Facility 4, the laboratory produces and tests the grapefruit-size nuclear “pits” that are at the cores of warheads. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative media organization, the results of which were published in The Washington Post on June 19, described years of safety concerns about the facility, which was ordered temporarily shut down in 2013 because of fears it was ill-equipped to prevent an accident.

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On the afternoon of Aug. 11, 2011, the media organization reported, a nuclear technician positioned eight rods of plutonium inside what is called a glove box, a sealed container allowing technicians to handle the plutonium without contamination. The technician wanted to take a photograph for senior managers. Upon returning from a lunch break, a supervisor saw the rods were dangerously close together, raising the prospect of a criticality accident, an uncontrolled chain reaction in which fissionable material such as plutonium releases energy and generates a deadly burst of radiation. On seeing the error, the supervisor ordered the technician to reach into the box and move the rods apart. This was also an error that may have increased, rather than decreased, the chances of a criticality accident. In the end, the material did not go critical, but the consequences were dire: Almost all the criticality specialists at the lab responsible for keeping workers safe decided to quit. The Center for Public Integrity reported that the lab, now slowly resuming operations, continues to suffer an acute shortage of engineers specializing in keeping the plutonium from fissioning out of control, as well as other safety issues.

This is a problem that the Trump administration should not neglect. The lab is a link in a sizable chain that must be maintained if the United States is going to carry out the ambitious trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization program launched in the Obama years. The Pentagon has set a long-term goal of making 50 to 80 plutonium pits a year, a torrid pace that could probably be reduced. But the safety concerns at the lab have clearly impaired this work, forcing deferral of manufacture and testing of plutonium cores, and over the longer term, that could affect the future of the arsenal.

The administration is now conducting a nuclear posture review, a good opportunity to set priorities. President Donald Trump and Congress will, hopefully, make choices about what kinds of nuclear weapons will be required in the decades ahead, and for what missions. It goes without saying that a credible deterrent force also means paying attention to safety, down to the last glove box.

First Published: June 26, 2017, 4:00 a.m.

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