A near-disaster at a federal nuclear weapons laboratory takes a hidden toll on America’s arsenal

Repeated safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Laboratory’s work on the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads

As reported in an extensive article, which chronicles the history of fatal nuclear criticality accidents at Los Alamos (in Sept. 1945, May 1946, and again in 1958), and worldwide (as at Tokai-mura, Japan in Sept., 1999), the investigative journalism reveals a 2011 near-miss criticality accident, due to ignorance and arrogance, at Los Alamos. The article is written by Patrick Malone at the Center for Public Integrity, with national security managing editor R. Jeffrey Smith contributing.

This article is but Part One of a Five Part series entitled "Nuclear Negligence."

As described on the Center for Public Integrity's website:

Nuclear Negligence examines safety weaknesses at U.S. nuclear weapon sites operated by corporate contractors. The Center’s probe, based on contractor and government reports and officials involved in bomb-related work, revealed unpublicized accidents at nuclear weapons facilities, including some that caused avoidable radiation exposures. It also discovered that the penalties imposed by the government for these errors were typically small, relative to the tens of millions of dollars the NNSA gives to each of the contractors annually in pure profit.