Nuke almost accidentally detonated last year

[Jerk]

Live in Amarillo? If so, you almost bought the farm last year from an accidental nuclear detonation:

December 12, 2006

Honorable Samuel Bodman
Secretary of Energy
Department of Energy
1000 Independence Ave., SW
Washington, DC 20585

Via Facsimile: (202) 586-4403

Dear Secretary Bodman:

In November 2006, the Project On Government Oversight received the attached anonymous letter from a number of workers at the Pantex Plant outside Amarillo, Texas. The letter raised some very serious safety concerns at Pantex. POGO has been able to confirm a number of the problems raised in the letter, including that there is widespread fatigue and overworking of production technicians who work on the warheads. As you know, safety at Pantex is paramount in the nuclear weapons complex because it is responsible for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons.

According to the August 2006 “Pantex Plant Weekly Report” from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, “PTs [production technicians] work 72 hour weeks (6 days, 12 hours).” POGO has been told by sources that 80 hours per week is not unusual. As you know, this is already a high stress working environment dealing with high explosives and full up, or fully assembled, nuclear weapons. The excessive work hours are resulting from pressure by Pantex operator BWXT and the National Nuclear Security Administration to meet unrealistic production goals given the size of the workforce. In 2007, the disassembly production goals will increase by 50%. This is a recipe for disaster. One senior nuclear scientist said that he “would not work on his car engine if he were fatigued from a 72-hour work week, and sure as hell would not work on a nuclear weapon.”

Pantex has had serious safety problems spanning back at least several years. For example, in 2004, while a W56 warhead – which, at 1200 kilotons (or 100 times the yield of a Hiroshima bomb), is one of the largest missile-launched warheads in our stockpile – was being disassembled, a crack was discovered in the high explosive (HE). Technicians used the equivalent of duct tape to hold the cracked high explosive together. The next year, Pantex paid a $124,000 fine for safety violations related to the HE cracking incident.

Now we have learned that in March 2005, there was a “near-miss” event while disassembling another W56 warhead. Apparently the production technicians were using a faulty tool, putting too much pressure on the warhead. On November 29, 2006, Pantex was only fined $110,000 – 18 months after the near-miss incident. What was not made public at the time the fine was levied, however, is that according to safety experts knowledgeable about this event, it could actually have resulted in the detonation of the warhead. This incident was particularly dangerous because the W56 warhead was deployed in 1965, pre-dating the three basic enhanced safety features which reduce the possibility of an accidental detonation that are now required on more modern weapons. There are still several older warheads slated for dismantlement that do not include these enhanced features.

Both fines are chump change for BWXT, which makes as much as $30 million annually in award fees and incentives for operating Pantex alone, after its costs are covered. These ridiculously-low fines provide absolutely no deterrent for the sloppy safety procedures of BWXT.

While the older and more unstable nuclear warheads continue to be handled at Pantex, it is clearly of the utmost importance that DOE hold the contractor equally accountable for safety as for production schedules. By cutting corners, BWXT is unnecessarily endangering the workforce, and indeed the entire Texas panhandle.

We urge the Department of Energy to consider a deep cut in the award and incentive fees so that BWXT will take these safety problems seriously.

POGO certainly applauds the acceleration of dismantling weapons in accordance with international treaties. In fact, we believe these efforts should be the highest priority for the nuclear weapons complex given the benefits dismantlement bring in cost savings and improved safety and security. As a result, additional production technicians should be hired immediately in order to bring the average work week to a more reasonable and safe level while meeting these goals. Finally, aggressive steps need to be taken to change the culture at Pantex so that workers feel free to express concerns about their work environment.

We understand that DOE and BWXT are in the midst of an investigation into these issues. We are requesting unclassified copies of these reports as soon as they are complete. If you have any questions, please contact me at (202) 347-1122.

Sincerely,


Danielle Brian
Executive Director

Enclosure: Correspondence from anonymous sources re: problems at Pantex

cc: Sen. Carl Levin
Sen. John McCain
Sen. Jeff Bingaman
Sen. Pete Domenici
Sen. Byron Dorgan
Rep. Pete Visclosky
Rep. Dave Hobson
Rep. Ike Skelton
Rep. Duncan Hunter

pogo.org/p/homeland/hl-061201-bodman.html

[reevie]

It's not made up. Here's the LA Times Article from Wednesday:


Safety issues probed at Texas nuclear plant
The Department of Energy announces its Pantex inquiry, sparked by reports of long hours and poor conditions.
By Ralph Vartabedian, Times Staff Writer
December 13, 2006


The Energy Department said Tuesday that it was investigating a series of alleged safety problems at its Pantex nuclear weapons plant near Amarillo, Texas, including complaints by employees that they were being required to work up to 84 hours a week to meet decommissioning schedules for nuclear weapons.

The complaints were first raised in an anonymous five-page letter sent last month to John Fees, president of BWX Technologies Inc., which operates the plant under an Energy Department contract. In a statement, the Energy Department said it began its investigation as soon as it received the letter.


The Pantex plant, which has 3,500 employees, handles the servicing of nuclear weapons and the decommissioning of excess weapons under arms control treaties. During the Cold War, it was the sole assembly site for nuclear bombs.

Employees characterized conditions at the Pantex complex, which sits on 25 square miles and began nuclear work in the early 1950s, as "degraded" and in disrepair in many areas. The letter also said engineers were being required to work up to 84 hours in a seven-day week and production technicians 72 hours in a six-day week.

The employees said the company was preoccupied with safety slogans, such as the recently created "Pantex High Reliability Organization," that were masking the stresses in the plant. "Senior management is distracted, losing sight of the overall picture and circumstances," the letter said, adding that some managers lacked specific experience in handling nuclear weapons.

"The consequences are almost too awful to speak," the employees said, adding that an accidental nuclear detonation would kill everybody in the plant, destroy the complex and parts of Amarillo, as well as contaminate thousands of square miles.

The authenticity of the letter has not been called into question, though BWXT officials issued a statement sharply disputing the allegations.
"BWXT Pantex takes seriously any employee concerns about safe operations, and the company is currently comparing the specific concerns expressed in the letter with the reality of its day-to-day work," plant General Manager Dan Swaim said. "The company strongly disagrees with the writers' viewpoint that successful production negatively impacts worker safety."

Swaim said the company was conducting an internal review of the allegations.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Tuesday that he had directed the top safety and health officials of the National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency within the Energy Department, to investigate conditions at Pantex.

The Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group that has focused on nuclear security and safety, asked Bodman in a letter Thursday to send BMXT a message by cutting its profit and to force the company to hire more workers. The group said it had confirmed a number of the allegations in the letter, which was first reported by the Amarillo Globe-News.

Some of the allegations were also cited this year by federal inspectors from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent agency that checks safety conditions at nuclear weapons plants.

An August field report by the safety board said BWXT was having difficulty finding qualified production technicians and was forcing its staff to work six 12-hour days a week, the maximum its procedures allowed. The conditions were supposed to improve by September; no subsequent reporting has indicated whether the situation changed.

The safety board also reported that severe weather in Amarillo had left a number of facilities with standing water. "Leaks through facility structure left puddles of water in several nuclear facility interlocks and bays and equipment rooms that support nuclear operations," the August report said.

The employees put the issue more bluntly: "Look around the plant. You will find leaking roofs, crumbling buildings, waist-high weed-infested landscapes, barricades and safety tape that makes this once-proud plant look like a crime scene."

Weekly reports have noted a series of violations of authorized procedures. On Nov. 27, the company was fined $110,000 for safety violations involving excessive force used in 2004 in disassembling a W56 nuclear bomb — an old design that lacks modern safety features.

Despite ordering an investigation, Bodman said that the Energy Department had "confidence that Pantex will continue its outstanding work, while keeping stringent safety and security policies in place."

The high level of activity at the Pantex plant apparently reflects the increasing amount of work to maintain aging U.S. nuclear weapons that must be overhauled, as well as to decommission weapons under the 2002 Moscow Treaty. The U.S. and Russia have agreed to reduce deployed strategic warheads to about 2,000 each by 2012, a two-thirds reduction for the U.S.


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[email protected]

[StoopTroup]

I feel somewhat terrorized...

Anyone know a good Atty?

[SicEmBaylor]

My dad is pretty paranoid about this sort of thing. He's convinced Dallas is going to get hit sometime, so he is bugging me to come up with a good way to evacuate Waco and get home. I told him if anything happened in Dallas that I'd just try to get to Amarillo or Lubbock and from there go home.

[Jerk]

You think they would have blamed Bush?

[BigRedJed]

Can we make a new rule that all safety-deficient nuclear warheads are disassembled downwind from OKC? PLZKTHX.