yet another interesting item

Feds Answer Calls for Nuke Safety By Noah Shachtman
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,63389,00.html

02:00 AM May. 08, 2004 PT

Whistleblowers and government-watchdog groups have long pleaded with the Department of Energy to do something about the slipshod security at its nuclear weapons labs. Those pleas have been ignored, for the most part.

But something remarkable happened on Friday. Instead of giving the watchdogs the finger, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced a series of defensive measures that were taken straight from the watchdogs' wish list.

Atomic storehouses, vulnerable to terrorist attack, will be emptied of their radioactive loads, Abraham promised in a speech at the Savannah River nuclear facility in Georgia. Classified data will be better locked down, on diskless computers. And the rent-a-cops who have been so laid-back in their protection of the country's uranium supply might even be replaced with a federal force.

The speech was the latest attempt by Abraham to change the way his department works with outside groups. In January, he brought two of the department's most prominent critics -- Peter Stockton and Danielle Brian, with the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO -- into department headquarters to make recommendations for improving security.

"We must be willing to take constructive criticism," Abraham said on Friday. "Too often, I see a reflexive dismissal of all ideas or suggestions not invented at DOE (the Department of Energy), whether they be from a member of Congress ... or an outside stakeholder organization like POGO. That is not how a first-class organization behaves."

Of course, the watchdogs will wait before starting their victory dance. They've heard promises before, only to be disappointed when the promises fall flat. But there's a growing sense of optimism that's been absent since a series of scandals began rocking the labs in 1999.

Stockton said Abraham's speech went "far beyond any previous administration's moves." He added, "Now we'll see if it gets done."

Abraham opened his talk with high praise for the nuclear labs' current roster of guards for hire.

"All of you represent the most skilled and capable elements of the protective forces," he said.

But it quickly became clear that Abraham had grown tired of their repeated lapses. The Energy Department recently caught the guards at the Y-12 nuclear facility cheating on security tests. The Department's inspector general believes such cheating may go back 20 years or more. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, the protective force has failed repeatedly to keep out even the lamest of infiltrators.

For the first time, Abraham announced he may cancel the guards' contracts and create a federal police squad to watch over the nation's most critical nuclear facilities.

"Despite Abraham's rhetoric, he gave a back-handed slap to the amateurish present protective forces," said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.

Not that Coghlan minds. He and other outside agitators have complained for years about the guards' lackluster performance.

There's an inherent conflict of interest in using these private guards, explained Los Alamos investigator-turned-whistleblower Glenn Walp. They're hired by the companies and universities that receive the multibillion-dollar contracts to manage the Energy Department labs.

Security lapses jeopardize those fat deals. "That means guards' jobs depend on everything being just great," Walp said.

Federalizing the guard force, Walp added, should take away some of those convoluted incentives.

"It is a wise move, a smart move, and one (fellow whistleblower) Steve (Doran) and I have been recommending since 2002," he said.

In his speech on Friday, Abraham also reaffirmed his commitment to move all of the weapons-grade nuclear material out of Los Alamos' Technical Area 18 -- long considered a potential terrorist target. During a 1997 security drill, mock attackers wheeled 200 pounds of uranium out of the site in a Home Depot wheelbarrow. Three years later, they forced their way into Technical Area 18 and simulated a nuclear explosion that would have taken out a sizeable chunk of the state.

The Pulsed Reactor at Sandia National Laboratories had also been labeled by watchdogs an environmental and safety disaster waiting to happen. It sits just a few miles from the center of Albuquerque, New Mexico. And it's loaded with 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.

Abraham said Friday that the reactor would be shuttered within three years -- "great, great news," according to Greg Mello, who heads the Los Alamos Study Group, a New Mexico-based nuclear-disarmament advocate.

Abraham also announced he would speed up the construction of a more secure nuclear storage area at the Y-12 facility. It holds about 5,000 "secondaries" -- the hearts of thermonuclear bombs. In test after test, Y-12 has been shown to be just about indefensible.

During one exercise, according to a security consultant, assailants were able get a 44-pound uranium package "outside of the fences in 38 seconds."

In November, the Energy Department revealed it would have to spend $1.6 million to replace more than 100,000 locks at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, after nine master keys to the ultra-sensitive nuclear facility disappeared. That followed an almost identical incident at Sandia in March 2003. Except, when the keys were lost at Sandia, a security official there was told to "fake an investigation" into where they went, according to a letter from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to Abraham.

Today, Abraham ordered the Energy Department's archipelago of nuclear sites to stop using keys altogether within five years -- and go with a biometric or pass-code-based system instead.

In addition, Abraham proposed that the lab should phase out its computers in favor of PCs without disk drives or other removable media. The idea is to keep an insider from walking off with a CD full of top-secret information. It's a move Stockton said his group has been pushing since 2001, after two missing hard drives packed with nuclear weapon designs were found behind a copy machine at Los Alamos.

Diskless computers have been the standard at classified centers for years, noted Bill Preidhorsky, chief scientist of the lab's nonproliferation division. And Kevin Vixie, a Los Alamos mathematician who has frequently clashed with the lab's management, said such workstations could cut down on the thicket of regulations Los Alamos scientists have to plow through when they're working on their PCs. Right now, a researcher can't go to the bathroom without first powering down his computer.

Abraham didn't give the watchdogs everything they wanted on Friday. POGO executive director Danielle Brian told a congressional committee recently that it would be "nearly impossible to properly protect the weapons quantities of plutonium" stored at Lawrence Livermore. Abraham pledged only to consider moving the nuclear material.

But Brian and Stockton aren't complaining. "After years of getting nothing," Stockton said, "half a loaf is huge."