Livermore lab fails terror test
By Betsy MasonContra Costa Times
Article Created: 05/13/2008 07:14:26 PM PDT
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory's protective force failed to deter a mock terrorist attack during a recent security drill, according to a Time magazine report online Monday.
During the simulated night-time attack several weeks ago, a team posing as terrorists was able to defeat the lab's defenses and get hold of their target of pretend nuclear material, according to unnamed sources.
Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the lab for the Department of Energy, told the Times that the initial results of the inspection were "disappointing."But he noted that the simulated attacking force was given insider information and other advantages that "would be highly improbable in a real world scenario."While we have security measures in place that are working, in a number of cases they can be improved upon, and the system pointed that out," he said.
Four of the areas of the lab's security that were inspected during a routine, seven-week independent audit conducted by the Department of Energy's Office of Health, Safety and Security during April and March were rated as "effective performance," and four needed improvement.
The lab has taken action to fix problems uncovered by the inspection, said lab spokeswoman Susan Houghton."We've added officers, reassigned personnel, and we have accelerated our training from quarterly to daily," she said.
No nuclear material or sensitive information was ever at risk, Houghton said. A DOE official familiar with the mock attack said that the Time report was exaggerated.
The attacking force did reach their objective, he said, and the defenders did not do as well as they could have in some areas, but the attack was unrealistic.
For one, the simulation started at the fence line of the plutonium facility known as Superblock, already well inside lab property, he said. The attack team was made up of security officers from other DOE sites and was allowed to haul in equipment, including ATVs and mock explosives.
Some members of the attack team were even positioned inside rooms in the Superblock, as if they had already cut fences, blown up walls and avoided guards. The mock attackers were also treated to a walkthrough ahead of the exercise."They knew exactly what was there, how to get to certain places and where the defenders would be," said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It just wouldn't happen in real life."The whole point of the force-on-force test is to really stress the system and hit the pressure points, he said."Things don't run perfectly in a force-on-force," he said. "That's not the point. You want to see where the stress points are. That's why you do it."
Among the problems highlighted by the Time magazine report was the failure of one of the lab's powerful Gatling guns, capable of firing 4,000 rounds per minute, to get into firing position due to problems with a hydraulic system. The guns were added to the lab's arsenal in 2006 to bolster its ability to protect the weapons-grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium."Failing an exercise like a mock terrorist attack highlights serious and unacceptable security shortcomings," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo.
"I have insisted that the plutonium housed at Livermore be consolidated and moved away from Livermore to a safe location away from population centers as soon as possible."
In March, the National Nuclear Security Administration said it was on track to remove the plutonium from the Livermore lab by 2012, in part to reduce security costs by consolidating special nuclear materials at fewer sites.
National Nuclear Security Administration director Thomas D'Agostino told the Times that it makes sense to move Livermore's plutonium to its sister nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico because "you don't have communities growing up around Los Alamos."
The 2012 goal is two years earlier than the previous plan, but critics still think the plutonium can and should be moved sooner."We think this should be the DOE's highest priority," said Marylia Kelley of Livermore-based watchdog group Tri-Valley CAREs.
Kelley believes the plutonium could be safely packaged and removed by 2010, perhaps even by the end of 2009.
The recent security test "shows that the nuclear materials at Livermore lab isn't secure and cannot be made secure," she said.
Betsy Mason at 925-952-5062 or bmason@bayareanewsgroup.com.
4 comments:
"Kelley believes the plutonium could be safely packaged and removed by 2010, perhaps even by the end of 2009."
If this happens you can bank on another RIF sooner than you could ever imagine. If the Pu is gone a lot of work and associated people will have to go with it simply because they can not justify their jobs.
Yep, as goes the Pu, so will eventually go the Lab.
More like as goes the Lab, went the Pu.
Don't worry, be happy. Here's a very good entry. No need for fancy hardware to get ones point across. From the LANL blog.
"Suicidal terrorists would not need to steal the fissile material, they could simply detonate it as part of an improvised nuclear device on the spot." (Danielle Brian/POGO.)
Yeah, right, it is called; the HEU bomb.
I have previously written:
1) A brute fact, due to organization problems and communication problems between and within the FBI and CIA, and lack of imagination and intelligence, 9/11 wasn´t stopped, a severe wake-up call, that started the 21st Century.
2) The HEU bomb, as well as the "dirty bomb" are more probable that terrorists actually would use against the US, than an actual nuclear weapon.
3) The HEU bomb, as outlined by nuclear physicists Thomas B. Cochran and Matthew G. McKinzie, in Scientific American, April 2008, pages 80-81:
"The ´quality´of nuclear material since then [Little Boy] has continued to improve, however, so much so that 1987 Nobel laureate physicist and Manhattan Project scientist Luis Alvarez noted that if terrorists had modern weapons-grade uranium [HEU], they ´would have a good chance of setting off a high-yieled explosion simply by dropping one half of the material on the other half.´To test that assertion, we modeled the difference between the Little Boy design and an improvised nuclear device as crude as the one Alvarez described.
We again used the Los Alamos software code and modeled the yield of Little Boy on publicly available design information, as well as two simple configurations of HEU in a gun assembly. Our modeling showed that, for an explosive-driven gun assembly, the minimum quantity that was required to obtain a one-kiloton explosive yield would be substantially less than the amount of HEU in Little Boy. Most disturbingly, with larger quantities, a one-kiloton yield could be achieved with a probability greater than 50 percent by dropping a single piece of HEU onto another, confirming Alvarez´s statement. Designing an HEU bomb seems shockingly simple. The only real impediment, therefore, is secretly gathering sufficient material."
(For a more thorough analyse of this subject:
Scientific American, April 2008, National Security, Detecting Nuclear Smuggling, Radiation monitors at U.S. ports cannot reliably detect highly enriched uranium, which onshore terrorists could assemble into a nuclear bomb, by Thomas B. Cochran and Matthew G. McKinzie, pages 76-81.)
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