POGO investigators have learned that the saga of the fire sprinkler system that won’t work in a fire is but the tip of the iceberg at Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) TA-55 plutonium facility.
It turns out that about 2 years ago, there were roughly 300 modifications to safety systems needed to protect workers and the public at TA-55 that were part of “design change packages,” or DCPs, that were never closed out. What this means is that the safety systems were modified, but were never verified as working after the modification.
Now, about 2 years later, the number of DCPs that have not been closed out has grown to around 600. One such system, the fire system, turns out to be one of the systems for which DCPs are not closed out and which was recently found not to be working. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that other safety systems necessary to protect the workers and public with open DCPs are also not working.
There is no incentive for LANL to verify that these safety systems are working because it is not part of the contract incentives (there is no money to be made). The local Department of Energy (DOE) government oversight has evidently not been doing its job for over 15 years since 1994 (which is when the open DCPs on safety systems date back to). The so-called Facility Representative program is a program where DOE federal personnel are supposed to be in the LANL facilities on a daily basis checking for, among other things, fraud, waste, abuse, and safety system operability.
According to our sources, some personnel at LANL have tried to bring this potentially dangerous safety issue to LANL management attention and have been ignored. It would take money from the LANL operating budget to ensure that safety issues like this are closed and this is evidently not a budgetary priority for LANL or DOE. Evidently, safety systems potentially not working — which are necessary to protect the public — is another “acceptable risk,” apparently like the 3000 rem radiation dose that the public could be exposed to in the event of an earthquake and fire in which the sprinkler system would not work.
Rather than doing the job that LANL and DOE is paid for, management at LANL has discussed just throwing out the older DCPs which date back more than 15 years to 1994. It is not clear to POGO why DOE oversight management and LANL management is being paid for this unsurpassed level of incompetence. The Local DOE Site Office manager is a senior SES for which the top salary is about $172K and the LANL Director makes over $800K. It is unclear why this facility is operating if the safety systems are not known to be working with certainty.
POGO has obtained an email exchange detailing the situation, which can be viewed here.
-- Peter Stockton
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