
‘Criticality safety event’ occurred at LANL’s plutonium facility - jacquesm
https://www.abqjournal.com/1067835/report-criticality-event-occured-at-lanl-plutonium-facility.html
======
raverbashing
"A critical report earlier this year by the Center for Public Integrity
highlighted at a 2011 incident at LANL where eight plutonium rods were placed
side-by-side for a celebratory photograph"

I am appalled by this. Professionals shouldn't be doing this

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Is this dangerous? Genuine question, it sounds like I should also be appalled
but I don't know anything about plutonium.

Edit: Answered my own question:

> keeping bits of plutonium far apart is one of the bedrock rules that those
> working on the nuclear arsenal are supposed to follow to prevent workplace
> accidents. It’s Physics 101 for nuclear scientists, but has sometimes been
> ignored at Los Alamos

~~~
dreamcompiler
It's the most dangerous thing that can happen at a nuclear weapons facility.
Too much plutonium in one place and it starts going critical. It doesn't
explode, but lots of radiation comes out suddenly and people die of radiation
poisoning. People have died from such incidents in the past.

~~~
marcosscriven
I don’t know for sure, but I thought I read somewhere it was called “tickling
the dragon’s tail”?

~~~
disconnected
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)

> _On May 21, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin and seven other Los Alamos
> personnel were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting another experiment to
> verify the exact point at which a subcritical mass (core) of fissile
> material could be made critical by the positioning of neutron reflectors._

> _It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron
> reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector
> over the core via a thumb hole on the top. As the reflectors were manually
> moved closer and farther away from each other, scintillation counters
> measured the relative activity from the core. Allowing them to close
> completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass
> and a lethal power excursion_

> _Under Slotin 's unapproved protocol, the only thing preventing this was the
> blade of a standard straight screwdriver, manipulated by the scientist's
> other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert,
> performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue
> jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi
> reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they
> continued performing it. Scientists referred to this flirting with the
> possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail",
> based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman, who compared the experiments
> to "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon"._

An aside: It's this kind of shit that scares the crap out of me with regards
to nuclear energy. Some - literal - cowboy completely disregards the rules,
endangers him and his colleagues, and then someone gets injured or killed. All
for the benefit of showing off.

We should do better than this, but incidents like this give me little faith.

Unsurprisingly, this experiment killed Slotin:

> _On the day of the accident, Slotin 's screwdriver slipped outward a
> fraction of an inch while he was lowering the top reflector, allowing the
> reflector to fall into place around the core._

> _[Slotin] received a lethal dose of 1,000 rad (10 Gy) neutron and 114 rad
> (1.14 Gy) gamma radiation in under a second and died nine days later from
> acute radiation poisoning._

~~~
rleigh
The picture of this is pretty indicative of the culture there. The room is a
mess, they are handling the material with bare hands, and there's an empty
glass coke bottle next to the apparatus. Given how toxic beryllium dust is,
handling with bare hands and faces, and having a drink next to it, all of
which seem to be asking for inhalation or ingestion. As for Slotin and the
screwdriver, it beggars belief; why didn't they build a mechanism to raise and
lower the hemisphere from a safe distance and within a shielded container? A
simple hinge, and wire with counterweight would have allowed to to be
carefully lowered and to "fail safe". It all seems a bit messy and haphazard,
rather than the clean and organised environment we might hope such activities
take place in.

When I look at the steps I used to go through multiple times a day when
working in Cat 2 and Cat 3 biological containment facilities to work with
cells and pathogens, including double door airlocks under negative pressure,
safety hoods, protective gear etc., stringent aseptic practice LANL seems
quite lax in their practices. We all watched ourselves and each other for bad
technique and careless infractions to maintain that discipline without the
need for dedicated separate safety inspectors (though periodic inspections did
occur). That good practice was also tied into self-preservation of self and
others when working with dangerous stuff; no one wants infection by some
horrible pathogen. It seems quite bad to be working with even more lethally
hazardous materials with basically zero protection, and the description of the
attitude of the management 2011 and the present day towards safety seems to be
equally cavalier.

In all the academic and industrial environments I've worked in, we had
rigorous inventory and tracking of all dangerous materials (biological and
radioactive), so it seems odd that LANL fails so badly here. This was the
first casting in four years, and they immediately failed: why wasn't there
preparation and planning for moving the material before the casting even
started? Is Pu randomly stored around with place? Is there no oversight at
all? In the lab I currently work in, we have to track every last trace of
radioactivity (mainly P, N for biological labelling I think; I'm not involved
directly) and account for it for statutory reporting every quarter, and if you
fail to do it properly there would be a massive investigation and you would be
banned from working with it; the lab managers make a bit deal of it, and
rightly so.

It's a little ironic that safety has been compromised in order to meet
production targets, but this resulted in a complete shutdown. Had they worked
safely and sensibly and avoided the shutdowns, they would have overall been
vastly more productive even if this was slower than the management would have
liked. I've seen this pattern several times now in multiple places, from
factories, to research laboratories to software development. It all comes down
to unrealistic management goals from the top which dictate working at a fast
place with attendant quality and safety problems no matter that a better end
goal could be realised by working at a slower place with a little more care
and thought. We see the same problem every time software design or
implementation is compromised by a tight deadline with no scope for doing it
the right way for the longer term, purely to meet some unimportant (in the
greater scheme) short term deliverable.

~~~
mikeash
The lab was created as part of the nation's balls-to-the-wall effort to build
a nuclear bomb with which to smite its enemies in war. I imagine that safety
was only a concern to the extent that incidents would slow them down.
Otherwise, with thousands of people dying each day in the war, it's worth the
risk to people at the labs if they can end the war faster.

Slotin got himself killed after the war was over, but it was less than a year
after, and I imagine that sort of "get it done at any cost" culture does not
change overnight.

I wonder if that attitude is in fact the root of the trouble today. Especially
since I bet that the "save the nation and damn the risks" attitude came back
for at least a decade or two once the Cold War ramped up.

~~~
rleigh
I think you may well be correct in your assessment. Culture doesn't change
overnight, and it's also inherited so may well have persisted to the present
day. It also doesn't change without external pressure, and only reluctantly
even then.

I've seen different cultures in various labs I've worked in or had contact
with, and it can vary wildly from being extremely disciplined to extremely
sloppy and both practices can be picked up by new people from the individuals
concerned.

------
nerdy
I was interested to see the photograph from 2011 and found this:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-
federal...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-federal-
nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal)

It's pretty scary how mundane they look.

~~~
steanne
"Virtually all of the Los Alamos engineers tasked with keeping workers safe
from criticality incidents decided to quit, having become frustrated by the
sloppy work demonstrated by the 2011 event and what they considered the lab
management’s callousness about nuclear risks and its desire to put its own
profits above safety."

~~~
dreamcompiler
This is key. It's hard to find criticality safety engineers, and their absence
(as well as management not giving a damn) was probably a key factor in the
2016 incident.

~~~
karlkatzke
Having the wrong management is almost worse than having unqualified engineers.

I worked in a startup where they had put the Systems Operations (as in, Linux
datacenter guys) under the Chief Marketing Officer for about a year for
(reasons).

Three years later, we are STILL cleaning up after that mess. Wrong management
creates problems that aren't so much a result of ineffective management...
wrong management seems to always move resources away from things that most
engineers would call "normal and customary processes" (like patching software
or updating libraries that software is dependent upon) and that's how you end
up with Equifax. Or a smoking hole in the desert somewhere in New Mexico.

~~~
patcheudor
Indeed! There's mounting evidence that Equifax simply didn't "get" application
development in addition to operations and patching. I doubt the developers of
their vulnerable mobile app were responsible for patching. As such, we've seen
security issues which span the company where it's likely the mobile app
developers not only didn't report to the same management chain as those in
operations, but likely reported to entirely different organizations. This of
course points to management issues all the way to the top of the company.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/40468811/heres-why-equifax-
yanke...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40468811/heres-why-equifax-yanked-its-
apps-from-apple-and-google-last-week)

------
f2f
I used to work there right after finishing grad school. It was just when the
systematic dismantling of that organization had started taking place. New
bosses, new umbrella organizations, new rules (for profit vs non-profit).

Within 12 months of me starting there everyone more senior than me had
scattered elsewhere. Soon I was gone too. This happened at every level and in
every division. The amount of know-how lost just to forced retirement is
incalculable...

So sad to hear things are not getting better there. I was very proud to be a
part of it for even a little amount of time.

~~~
nicodoggo
I had a similar experience at another national lab. It was a dream job up
until a few months in. That was when higher positions were swapped out with
new people seemingly overnight whose philosophies were completely different
from what the lab had subsisted on. In my department, it was as if anyone who
protested anything would be found packing their things the next day. It was
insane.

I left in less than a year for another job. Part of me wishes I would have
been able to pull through, but part of me thinks I wouldn't have had a job in
a few months. There's no way to really know. Going there for the first time
was a genuinely magical experience. I'll never forget it.

At the end of the day, change is good. But more consideration needs to be put
in the complexity you find at national labs.

I heard great things about LANL during my job. I hope things do improve over
there.

~~~
ianai
Well change may be coming. Their contract is up and likely to be fully changed
over next year
[https://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2017/05/16/cont...](https://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2017/05/16/contract-
change-looming-for-another-national-lab.html)

------
frankharv
I think that the sub-contractor culture is causing these problems. You see the
major labs are subbed out to the lowest bidder. These are the plant managers.
They are under pressure to produce pits for the countries nuclear arsenal
refresh. They have not produced anything for 5 years. Hiring skilled technical
engineers like molders and machinists is hard these days as votech died off in
alot are areas. Finding a knowledgeable temp is next to impossible. That is
essentially what these workers are. Temps.

In the old days the labs were run by stoic multinationals like duPont now we
have the fly by night bidders like Dyncorp and Fluor running our crown jewels.
Race to the bottom if you like. A rather strange process for something so
important.

~~~
novaleaf
Please cite the source that backs up your claim that the workers are
(essentially) temps. What you wrote sounds plausible but if the workers
actually have secure employment your entire theory falls apart.

~~~
0xffff2
I don't know the details of LANL or any other nuclear related organizations,
but I am a NASA contractor. We have contractors and civil servants working
side by side on the same research projects. The primary reason contractors are
used at NASA is that their employment is always directly tied to a specific
project, and they will be out of a job if that project ends. That isn't the
case for a civil servant, who basically has a job for life once hired. We
aren't exactly temps, but we are very much at risk of being fired any time
budgets are cut or reorganized.

~~~
kobeya
I was also a NASA contractor for many years. My employer was the prime
contractor but I worked with many subcontractors on my teams as well. Some of
them had very stable careers that predated and outlasted mine, since work was
available to them whenever they wanted due to their network of personal
connections with civil servants. On paper the civil servant was supposed to
ask the prime through the contracting officer for a body with a certain skill
set and we provided as we see fit, but that’s never how it worked in any
reality except on paper. The government employee would always make an informal
request, get assurance from the contractor staff about who would be provided,
usually someone they had prior experience with or interviewed, and then do the
paperwork. When I was interviewed it was by my contractor manager and
contractor team, but the civil servant was sitting in the room. I guarantee
you he had informal veto authority. As prime you would never risk a customer
relationship by doing otherwise — that would be a sure fire way to lose the
contract next time around.

In budget planning contractors disappear at the end of a project, which is
very useful for budget planning purposes. But in most cases it’s not like
those contractors are suddenly without a job, except in rare cases like
shuttle workers. Rather the agency has fixed and flat budget, so when one
winds down a new project starts up. And it is no surprise that in nearly all
cases the skill set allocation of new positions roughly equals those going
away. And the same people fill those roles, generally. (Again, the shut down
of shuttle and forced retirement of many workers is the exception to this.)

During my time there was a competitive rebid of the contract had. We won, but
during the process the competition approached many of us on the contract
individually, letting us know what sort of compensation they would be willing
to pay for us to jump ship if they won, to return to the same job wearing a
different patch on the sleeve. My civil servant “boss” (air quotes because he
wasn’t my manager on the org chart, but in day to day reality he effectively
was) pulled me aside to let me know that no matter who won I’d still have a
job. It was actually the same thing my employer did when they first won the
contract from someone else. I wasn’t there at the time, but many of my
coworkers were grandfathered in that way.

While what you are saying is correct, it might paint the wrong picture for
someone not having our shared experience.

------
yeukhon
Nuclear warhead security has always been problematic, not just the facility
producing the materials.

Watch [1] because reading the rest just make everyone dizzy. Our launch
protocol relies on very outdated technology. Not that there is anything wrong
with old technology in general (as long as the protocol is well-
established)...

We don't even want to bring up the recent unfortunate Navy crashes... we ought
to really step up.

"Shoot yourself in the foot."

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-
yF35g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g)

[2]: [http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/07/03/security-us-
nu...](http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/07/03/security-us-nukes-now-
official-secret.html)

[3]: [http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nuclear-
weapon...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nuclear-weapons-
military-hagel-20141114-story.html)

[4]: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/14/us-
nuclear-f...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/14/us-nuclear-
force-reviews-security-flaws-poor-leadership-chuck-hagel)

~~~
BrandonMarc
I toured a capsule decades ago, in the ground below an air force base. The
tech was very dated, however that also means it'd had plenty of time to be
"debugged" shall we say. No uncertainty as to whether it works right.

Plus, being so dated, far less likely to get hacked. Might've been a joke.

~~~
yeukhon
Yeah. I think old technology works. Just a human soldier vs a robot; sure
robots can shoot better if we get to that stage, but you can't hack a human...
or you can use a frying pan to kill a sniper if you happen to sneak on him...
(PUB insight)

what matters is how you use the old tech.

------
howard941
The NRC publishes daily reports of lost materials, criticality issues like
this, and related kerfluffles here

[https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-
status/...](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-
status/event/en.html)

------
mabbo
Bad things are going to happen in any organization. The key is not who you
fire or blame, it's how you change your processes so that no similar accident
can happen again. Make it impossible that this could reoccur.

An example of this might be something like "all plutonium rods are
individually stored in locked lead boxes". (I'm no nuclear physicist, this
might be a terrible idea, but you get the point).

It sounds to me like the leadership at this facility don't understand that.
These same things keep happening. They don't change their processes enough to
prevent it.

~~~
jessaustin
_Make it impossible that this could reoccur._

That's coming. Nuclear generation will only shrink from now on. In the
solar/wind/natural gas context, the public refuses to pay more for nuclear.
With decreasing need for fuel as existing power plants succumb to age and poor
management, eventually these labs will be seen as the hideous dangerous
boondoggles they have always been.

------
peterburkimsher
I'm anti-nuclear in Taiwan, mostly to the earthquake risk. I'm apathetic about
nuclear in Switzerland.

From reading the ScienceMag article that nerdy linked to, I learned that PF-4
has been unable to make new weapons for 4 years due to their safety staff
quitting. I joined some anti-nuclear protests before, but those protests
aren't targeting any individuals.

Meanwhile my best-case scenario (shutdown of weapons production) is happening,
because the staff quit due to bad management.

Good things are happening for the wrong reasons!

~~~
imglorp
I'm curious about the reasoning behind an anti-nuclear power position.

We've seen just about the worst that can happen, TMI, Cherynobyl and
Fukushima. All three were due to human error: mismanagement of the system
and/or mismanagement of the mitigation afterwards. These were terrible things
nobody would want in their town, but they are manageable and bounded.

Compared to the global disaster in progress, humans burning things, a nuclear
plant mishap seems preferable, no? Globally, we're facing a mass extinction,
more intense weather, and loss of low elevation islands and cities everywhere.
What's worse is the effect is not bounded, it will continue to get worsefor
centuries as we burn more stuff, for the whole planet.

Is this math not compelling?

~~~
peterburkimsher
You said it yourself!

"terrible things nobody would want in their town".

Where the natural risk is higher (e.g. Fukushima), my answer is "just say no".
Where the risk is manageable (deserts, a bunker under the Alps), I don't mind
so much.

Nuclear is better than coal or oil, by a long way. Renewables would be great,
but only hydro has a real chance to be competitive at this stage. So maybe
nuclear is needed in some less-populated, geologically stable regions. I trust
location more than any human safety protocol, because of the reasons in the
article.

~~~
tdb7893
I think part of the problem with nuclear is that the consequences are pretty
clear. Burning fossil fuels puts a lot of particulates into the air that
overall kills some people but we don't really think about it. It would be
interesting to see what type of power was responsible for the most deaths per
kWh

~~~
imglorp
The climate related deaths will rise, but humanity is having a hard time
thinking long term about it. Just this fall, Irma, Harvey, and Jose took a
number of lives and many billions in cleanup. Weather deaths per year might be
a useful statistic to follow, including heat and cold deaths.

------
dredmorbius
The mass exodus of safety engineers as described in a _Science_ article makes
me think that there's a parallel between the concept of exit, voice, loyalty
and the concept of brain-drain, which I see as a potential Gresham's Law
mechanism.

The staff effectively said "if our work is given so little heed here, we'll go
elsewhere where it is" \-- a classic brain-drain mechanism (and a frequent
response to a declining firm or corporate culture).

That's _also_ effectively a mechanism of the generalised concept of Gresham's
Law -- applied not only to money, but to any quality valued (or costed)
differentially, whether in one or multiple markets. A parallel that dates to
the earliest descriptions of the phenomenon -- Greek playwright Aristophanes
in "The Frogs" describes the behaviour as common to both coin and politicians,
an observation repeated by American journalist H.L. Mencken in the 20th
century, see his "Bayard vs. Lionheart".

A high-quality (and high-cost) team saw low professional rewards at Los
Alamos, and decamped for greener pastures. Brain drain occurs for various
causes, and not _just_ compensation, but if the conditions for work, rewards,
or oppression are discouraging in one location, the talent will generally go
elsehere.

In WWII, much scientific (and other) talent, _including much of that which
developed the U.S. nuclear programme_ fled Nazi-occupied Europe. From the
1950s through the 1970s, and to an extent still, black artistic, musical, and
business talent leaves the U.S. for Europe, for much the same reason: to
escape oppression, and to seak greater opportunities.

(Talent flow between subnational regions, industries, academia and business,
etc., follows similar patterns.)

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-
federal...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/near-disaster-federal-
nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty)

[http://www.jstor.org/stable/983793?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...](http://www.jstor.org/stable/983793?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

------
Animats
So LANL is making weapons now. That used to be done at Pantex. Why is LANL
doing this?

The US forgot how to make nuclear weapons. It's been decades since the US
built one from scratch. For about 20 years, the US lost the capability to make
H-bombs. There's some special material required, and the 1950s factory to make
it had worn out. An attempt was made to make it by a cheaper new process, and
that didn't work. A plant using the old process wasn't funded for decades.

The US has way too many old nuclear weapons, and has been overhauling them
during this period. There's no shortage. The fissionable parts don't wear out,
but the tritium has to be replaced every decade or so.

~~~
ms013
Pantex still exists. The facilities discussed in the article replace Rocky
Flats, which was shut down in the 90s.

------
akkartik
Umpteenth such case:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662612](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662612)

This is a tragedy waiting to happen.

------
okreallywtf
Somewhat related if you are interested to see what could have happened had the
samples gone supercritical [1]. Its eerie to read about, it sounds like
science fiction and its terrifying to think some of the smartest people in the
world made mistakes that could have been avoided by proper procedures.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)

------
__m
Fighting the nuclear proliferation with incompentence, a noble effort.

These men are heros, risiking their lifes to shut down LANL's production of
nuclear warheads

------
empath75
That has to be a hard job to hire good people for.

~~~
vortico
It is. There's a huge shortage of workers in the weapons research field
because of the old experienced guys retiring and the difficulty of training
new employees due to today's more stringent restrictions.

~~~
VLM
Also the stereotypical pay issue. They'll only pay average or lower despite
the annoyances of the job being top 1% or so of jobs. (drug tests, sec
clearance, unbelievable endless bureaucracy, weird job reqs, etc)

There are cultural issues, I remember reading something about "mid career"
mech engineers being five years exp. Which is great if you graduated at age 55
or so, not so good if you graduated at 22 with loans that will take more than
10 years to pay off. Meanwhile theres a handful of "lifer" boomers who clog up
the promotion pipeline until death at which point the talent pool is empty
between the ages of perhaps 30 to 60.

Its a poor conditions, underpaid, temp job, more or less. Insert surprise that
people would rather work anywhere else.

------
tlb
It must be hard to keep track of a bunch of pieces of plutonium not ever
getting near other pieces. Not something people are used to doing in normal
life. Some kind of radio tag that beeps when in proximity to other tags might
be a good safety measure.

------
sandworm101
"Criticality Safety Event" isnt the same as a _criticality event_. These are
violations of safety protocols, not nuclear physics run loose. Bad, but not
horrific considering the number of industrial accidents happening daily. There
was no risk of explosion, only localized radiation. Id be far more worried
about the dozens of chemical plants one flood away from exploding lethal
clouds into cities.

~~~
rleigh
No, it is horrific. The reason we have safety protocols is to avoid hazardous
situations which cause harm. Nothing happened in this case, but that's only
because of _luck_. Safety protocols are about reducing risk (the probability
of an accident) to minimal levels, and to violate them is to invite disaster
because it significantly increases the probability. They are about taking as
much human error out of the equation by formalising safe working practices. On
the surface, it might not appear to be a "big deal" because everything was OK
this time, but actually it means that safety is not being treated seriously
and that it's only a matter of time before that carelessness causes a serious
accident. That needs nipping in the bud and sorting out at every level of the
organisation.

If you've ever worked in an industrial or laboratory setting, you'll be
familiar with risk assessments, hazard levels, and the attendant working
practices that accompany them. Sometimes it's taken to bureaucratic extremes,
but it's always important to follow them strictly, because as soon as you
start ignoring them and taking shortcuts, you're no longer working safely and
you're endangering yourself and your co-workers. That's complacency, and it's
a bad place to be. I've seen a co-worker grow complacent about biohazards, and
they ended up in hospital with a nasty tropical parasite infecting them, all
because after several years of strict discipline, they grew complacent about
the danger because it's invisible and you get sloppy in your well practiced
routine (I assume; even they don't know exactly how it happened, but it was
almost certainly due to sloppy working practice). The same applies here; this
is very dangerous stuff but it looks innocuous and working with it leads to
trivialising the danger and working unsafely. In a well managed environment,
this should be being picked up on quickly by co-workers and inspections. Where
I've worked, any violation would mean a formal report up to line managers and
lab managers with appropriate disciplinary action. And I have done so when I
encountered it, for the safety of all of us. Safety culture needs to be
_ingrained_ so that it's second nature.

One angle to look at this is that "material transfer" is actually the primary
activity taking place in most industrial and laboratory settings. When I
worked in a food/drink industry lab, the logistics of the whole multi-stage
process from input raw materials, processing and production, to packaging
materials, packaging, warehousing and distribution were all carefully planned
and controlled (by an AS/400). When I worked in pharma, all the compounds were
in a central robotic compound library, and everything checked in or out was
controlled, and all operations in the laboratories were automated and
controlled. What I'm trying to say is that the logistics of material handling,
inventory and transfer have been solved in many industries for decades.
There's no question of where inventory lies because it's all recorded from
start to finish. You don't have a hold up because the warehouse is full, you
run out of packaging materials, or there are no empty tanks to fill from the
previous step in the pipeline, because you have a total view of the process
and can plan all the logistics to manage the process optimally. Random
materials are just not lying around to clog up the process. There's a managed
process with careful oversight and record keeping, and a safety culture
ingrained into all workers and management from the start. LANL seems to be
very backward in these respects.

------
joering2
Slightly off topic but its always funny to see you can freely buy Uranium on
Amazon: [https://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Uranium-
Ore/dp/B000796XXM/](https://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Uranium-
Ore/dp/B000796XXM/)

~~~
dkbrk
Why do you find that funny?

Natural uranium is pretty unremarkable. The greatest danger from it is heavy
metal poisoning. It's also common enough that restricting its availability
would be rather difficult.

Strictly speaking, if you got enough of it and were sufficiently determined
you could create an improvised nuclear reactor with it, something along the
lines of a carbon-moderated design. But the risk from that would be fairly
minimal apart from some local radioactive contamination.

~~~
joering2
Did you read the comments??

------
tener
They moved too much plutonium into the same room, risking nuclear reaction.

Perhaps they should use software to track the movement of materials which
would forbid the move from taking place when the end result would be
dangerous?

This begs for "Nuclear Material Blockhain"! ;-)

~~~
jabl
Indeed, all problems in the world can be solved by SV software startups
staffed by hipster brogrammers. The only real difficulty is which JS frontend
framework to choose.

~~~
jessaustin
_...hipster brogrammers..._

OT, but I've seen this phrase several times, and I have no idea what it means.
The two component words seem contradictory, like "preppie burnouts" or
"considerate bullies". Is this irony? If so, what are we attempting to
indicate about firms staffed by these people? Simply that they employ multiple
groups who annoy us?

~~~
jjawssd
Hipsters:

"[those who] reject the culturally-ignorant attitudes of mainstream consumers
..."

Brogrammers:

"[those who tend] to mimic stereotypical "jock", "bro", or "cool" culture in
combination with the egotism, insensitivity, and terrible humor of "nerd"
culture"

Combine the two and you get:

Narcissistic jock bros that are also egotistical insensitive nerds

------
lexicality
> Click the lock to give your browser permission to send you notifications
> then refresh the page.

I feel like browser manufacturers need to make "This website would like to
embed itself into your browser and send you push notifications indefinitely"
pop-up a little bit more scary if websites are getting this scummy.

~~~
erikj
Who is even using these browser notifications willingly at all?

~~~
adtac
I have enabled notifications on gitter (for a project I'm a maintainer of)
when I'm directly mentioned. That's a legit use-case.

But pretty much every other prompt has been obnoxious.

------
Havoc
How difficult can it be?

We've got corporations with global ERP/inventory systems...yet these guys
can't keep track of stuff within one facility?

------
m3kw9
I’m no nuclear physicist but from this article, they weren’t even close to
critical.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core)

~~~
mabbo
It's not about how close they were, it's how they ignore or don't understand
simple safety rules that are supposed to prevent incredibly dangerous
accidents.

These people aren't responsible enough to be working in the nuclear industry.

