Posted on 10/01/2014 10:06:35 PM PDT by Citizen Zed
Chronic lapses in safety procedures at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico may have led to a radiation leak that has forced a prolonged shutdown across the state of the only permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository, federal inspectors said on Wednesday.
The inspectors, in a sharply critical report, sought to explain how a barrel of plutonium-tainted debris from the nuclear weapons lab near Santa Fe ended up improperly packaged before it was shipped off for burial 300 miles away at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The leak of radiation, a small amount of which escaped to the surface and contaminated 22 workers at the plant, ranks as the facility's worst mishap since it opened in 1999.
Previous findings by government regulators suggest the waste drum contained a volatile mix of nitrate salts and organic matter that ruptured the barrel after it was placed in a vault half a mile underground at the plant.
Such a mix was shown to be "inherently hazardous" in a 2000 study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But flawed procedures at Los Alamos fostered a culture "that permitted the introduction of potentially incompatible materials" in waste drums there, according to the report by the U.S. Energy Department's Office of Inspector General.
The lab's "waste processing and safety-related control procedures should have prevented the addition of these potentially incompatible materials. However, the process failed in this matter," federal inspectors said in the report.
(Excerpt) Read more at trust.org ...
The US is toast.
All of this comes after a scientist named David Bruce Banner fired a Gamma Ray beam into his own skull, before disappearing....
Where aren’t they happening?
Just remember, you can’t put too much water in a nuclear reactor.
That was an awesome training film. I got watch it at TMI while in-processing for an outage.
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The Pepsi Syndrome.
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