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by exikyut
3185 days ago
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> And most remarkably, Los Alamos’s managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards. When the Energy Department on Feb. 1 released its annual report card reviewing criticality risks at each of its 24 nuclear sites, ranging from research reactors to weapon labs, Los Alamos singularly did “not meet expectations.” That sounds almost suspicious. It's hard to actually articulate that suspicion, but nuclear material is involved here. From earlier paragraphs: > In 2013, [officials in Washington] worked with the lab director to shut down its plutonium handling operations so the workforce could be retrained to meet modern safety standards. > Those efforts never fully succeeded, however, and so what was anticipated as a brief work stoppage has turned into a nearly four-year shutdown of portions of the huge laboratory building where the plutonium work is located, known as PF-4. What...? My first thought is "front for clandestine operation." How, or what, I don't know; I don't even know if something like that would be viable. If a TLA wants to play with nuclear stuff, couldn't they make their own base, or would they need an existing one? And if they did need to use these kinds of facilities, surely they'd be able to keep the media out. Okay maybe I'm wrong. I'll leave this comment here as a suggestion that maybe this line of thinking isn't correct after all. (I've been figuring this out as I've typed.) |
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> "What's in section PF-3?"
> "That's classified, I can't discuss it."
> "What's in section PF-4?"
> "That's where we used to work on plutonium for DoE and IAEA but we had a pattern of problems there and it was shut down."