NUKE STORAGE INSANITY AT LOS ALAMOS
There would seem to be fewer things crazier than chucking radioactive waste in a steel shack -- without making sure the place was safe first.
But that's exactly what happened at the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory.
For more than five years the lab kept plutonium-contaminated materials in a prefab, light steel building, known as PF-185, before the waste was shipped to Los Alamos' primary storage area.
But no one at the lab ever properly checked to see if PF-185 was a safe place to keep such dangerous material, government regulators assert. And that's a big problem, because at PF-185 there was enough plutonium, if combined together, to make a nuclear bomb.
Check out my article at Wired News for the rest of the story.
THERE'S MORE: "Personnel at Los Alamos National Laboratory today discovered that environmental monitoring equipment had been tampered with and that Laboratory property had been contaminated with an unknown, non-radioactive substance," according to a Los Alamos press release.
For additional material on the ongoing scandals at Los Alamos, click here, here, here, and here.
NUKE STORAGE INSANITY AT LOS ALAMOS
There would seem to be fewer things crazier than chucking radioactive waste in a steel shack -- without making sure the place was safe first.
But that's exactly what happened at the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory.
For more than five years the lab kept plutonium-contaminated materials in a prefab, light steel building, known as PF-185, before the waste was shipped to Los Alamos' primary storage area.
But no one at the lab ever properly checked to see if PF-185 was a safe place to keep such dangerous material, government regulators assert. And that's a big problem, because at PF-185 there was enough plutonium, if combined together, to make a nuclear bomb.
Check out my article at Wired News for the rest of the story.
THERE'S MORE: "Personnel at Los Alamos National Laboratory today discovered that environmental monitoring equipment had been tampered with and that Laboratory property had been contaminated with an unknown, non-radioactive substance," according to a Los Alamos press release.
For additional material on the ongoing scandals at Los Alamos, click here, here, here, and here.