Report: Another LANL worker's skin contaminated

Jan. 15—A Los Alamos National Laboratory worker's skin was contaminated by radioactive residue while disassembling old equipment despite wearing full protective gear, a government watchdog reported.

It's the second lab employee in as many weeks to have their skin contaminated in a work area where sealed compartments, known as glove boxes, are being dismantled so new machinery can be installed.

Overhauling and replacing glove boxes, which are used to handle radioactive materials, are part of the lab's effort to ready the plutonium facility to make 30 nuclear bomb cores, or pits, per year.

In the latest incident, contaminants were detected on the forearm of a worker who wore two sets of Tyvek coveralls and a battery-powered respirator while removing components from a legacy glove box, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board's Dec. 15 report.

The report described the glove box's enclosure as highly contaminated with a hydraulic fluid spill.

Technicians were unable to decontaminate the employee with the available methods at the worksite, so the worker was taken to the occupational medicine clinic for decontamination, the report said.

"The decontamination of skin is managed very closely at the lab to prevent any damage or irritation of the skin that could provide a pathway for the contamination to enter the body," lab spokesman Steven Horak wrote in an email. "In this case, the infrastructure at the facility does not support personnel decontamination that requires washing and rinsing."

In the previous week, a radioactive particle contaminated the skin of an employee who wore booties and a lab coat for protection while escorting carpenters into a work room. The light protective wear was allowed because the room was supposed to have been fully decontaminated.

There is generally a three- to four-week lag in the safety board's report being posted after an incident.

In the most recent incident, neither the safety board nor Horak offered an explanation of how the radioactivity penetrated the coveralls.

Both acknowledged the need to rethink how to suit up workers to better protect them as they do hazardous tasks, but both also noted simply adding more layers isn't the solution because the material holds in heat.

"While the protection level is high, it comes with the downside of being hot for the workers to work in," Horak wrote. "We have to balance worker safety and heat stress."

Reducing the employees' time working in the protective suits can help, he wrote. There also are different protective gear options that include a variety of materials and fabrics, he added.

An anti-nuclear watchdog group said worker-safety incidents are nothing new at the lab, but they are growing more frequent as the lab pursues pit production.

"These nuclear safety incidents are just never-ending," said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.

Coghlan argued they are made worse because the lab and its parent agency, the U.S. Energy Department, have sought to reduce oversight.

Federal agencies under the Trump administration sought to crimp the safety board's access, and the agencies continue to resist doing a full nationwide review of the sites — including the lab — that will be involved in bolstering nuclear weapons, Coghlan said.

The lab is putting workers at risk in a pursuit that is unnecessary, Coghlan argued. The lab doesn't need to manufacture any more pits because there are enough leftover from the Cold War to modernize the nuclear stockpile, he said, noting credible research indicates a pit can last 100 years.

Officials from the lab and the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation's arsenal, insist new pits are needed to modernize the weapons because the legacy devices have become unreliable.

The lab's workforce has swelled to more than 17,000 people, and its budget for modernizing the plutonium facility has grown to almost $1.8 billion as part of the effort to ramp up pit production.

Coghlan said those trends have led to the facility becoming crowded with too many activities going on at once — increasing the likelihood of dangerous mishaps.

But Horak insisted managers consider safety paramount and are always look at why something went awry and how to improve preventive measures.

"Safety is always our priority, regardless of the pace of work," Horak wrote.