Antinuclear

While the materials were not ultimately lost, the documents reveal repeated instances in which hazardous substances vital to making nuclear bombs and their components were mislabeled before shipment. That means those transporting and receiving them were not warned of the safety risks and did not take required precautions to protect themselves or the public, the reports say.

The risks were discovered after regulators conducted inspections during transit, when the packages were opened at their destinations, during scientific analysis after the items were removed from packaging, or — in the worst cases — after unwary recipients released radioactive contaminants, the Center for Public Integrity’s investigation showed.

Only a few, slight penalties appear to have been imposed for these mistakes. In the most recent instance, Los Alamos National Laboratory, a privately run, government-owned nuclear weapons lab about 50 miles northeast of Albuquerque, admitted five weeks ago that in June it had improperly shipped unstable, radioactive plutonium in three containers to two other government-owned labs via FedEx cargo planes instead of complying with federal regulations that required using trucks to limit the risk of an accident.

Los Alamos initially told the government that its decision stemmed from an urgent need for the plutonium at a federal lab in Livermore, Calif. But “there was no urgency in receiving this shipment. This notion is incorrect,” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s spokeswoman, Lynda Seaver, said in an email message.

The incident, which came to light after a series of revelations from the Center for Public Integrity about other safety lapses at Los Alamos, drew swift condemnation from officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington. It also provoked the Energy Department to order a three-week halt starting June 23 to all shipments out of Los Alamos, the largest of the nuclear weapons labs and a linchpin in the complex of privately run facilities that sustains America’s nuclear arsenal.

All of those involved from the individual contributor level up the management chain have been held accountable through actions that include terminations, suspensions and compensation consequences,” Los Alamos spokesman Matthew Nerzig said

The documents show that Los Alamos in particular has been a repeat offender in mislabeling its shipments of hazardous materials: For example, in a previously undisclosed 2012 case, it sent unlabeled plutonium — a highly carcinogenic, unstable metal — to a University of New Mexico laboratory where graduate students sometimes work, according to internal government reports.

The plutonium was accidentally opened there, leading to a contamination of the lab that the university to clean it and Los Alamos to dispose of the debris. In total, 11 of the 25 known shipping mistakes since July 2012 involved shipments that either originated at Los Alamos or passed through the lab. Thirteen of the 25 incidents involved plutonium; highly enriched uranium, which is another nuclear explosive; or other radioactive materials.

Some of the mislabeled shipments went to toxic waste dumps and breached regulatory limits on what the dumps were allowed to accept, according to the reports. Ensuring that all shipments are accurately labelled is vital to emergency personnel, whose safety and ability to protect the public in the event of an accident rely on correct knowledge of whatever they’re trying to clean up or contain, said Patricia Klinger, a spokeswoman for U.S. Department of Transportation hazardous materials regulators. She did not respond to questions about why the department only rarely appears to have imposed fines.

Internal National Nuclear Security Administration records indicate that in the 25 incidents since July 2012, contractors received three fines. In more than 20 instances, regulators did not directly fine the contractors in enforcement actions stemming from the shipping errors.