(Original photos by Dan Meyers and Michael Held on Unsplash)
When Americans think about the security of nuclear weapons facilities, they may concern themselves with physical security to stop terrorist attacks, or digital security to keep out malicious hackers (looking at you, Florida water treatment plant). But federal officials are highlighting another surprising hazard: wildfires.
Specifically, a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Inspector General raps contractors working at Los Alamos National Laboratory for failing to secure the facility against out-of-control fires and potentially endangering some of the most sensitive and dangerous work done by the nation’s nuclear scientists.
“As demonstrated by past wildland fires, the potential for regional and local wildlands fires poses a substantial risk to the operational capabilities that enable the Department to meet its assigned mission needs at [Los Alamos],” the IG report says.
The report said investigators were especially concerned about crown fires, “catastrophic fires that spread quickly through the crowns of trees in dense forests.”
“[T]he risk of crown fires in canyons was concerning because several mission-critical facilities are located on mesas at the tops of the canyons, which could be impacted by a fire,” it says.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory was founded in 1943 in the “high desert of New Mexico” with a single express purpose: build a nuclear bomb. Ever since it has been home to the development and maintenance of America’s nuclear arsenal — along with research into everything from space exploration to nanotechnology — with an annual budget of nearly $3 billion.
Why the “high desert of New Mexico”? The IG report explains that lab, which is made up of hundreds of structures and 13 nuclear facilities, is situated on 36 miles of “undeveloped land” because it naturally provides “security and safety buffer zones for the types of research and testing performed.”
But that “undeveloped land” also means land that is vulnerable to fast-moving wildfires — which could have devastating consequences for the lab.
The report cites two past large wildfires that crept close to the lab, one in 2000 and the other in 2011. The 2000 fire, called the Cerro Grande Fire, “was a devastating crown fire that spread onto LANL property and through densely forested canyons, burning over 7,500 acres of Department land and shutting down operations for 15 days.
“This fire damaged or destroyed over 100 structures and ruined a wide variety of LANL projects and scientific records, resulting in damages to [the lab] totaling $331 million, not including lost productivity costs estimated at $15 million per week during the shutdown and recovery efforts,” the report says.
Investigators recommended a number of measures to improve the facilities’ fire safety, including dealing with overgrown areas and clearing fire roads, as laid out in the not-fully-implemented Wild Fire Mitigation and Forest Health Implementation Plan from 2019.
PRIMARY SOURCE: Department of Energy’s Inspector General Report
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