By George Lobsenz
The Energy Department has granted its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory a waiver from tougher security standards imposed on DoE sites in 2005, even though the nuclear weapons facility holds large amounts of plutonium and high-enriched uranium and is located in the heavily populated San Francisco Bay area, a watchdog group charged Monday.
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) said while the waiver recognizes clear vulnerabilities at the lab that appear impossible to fix, a better solution would be to expedite the removal of weapons-usable nuclear materials from Livermore, which unlike other DoE weapons facilities is located in a densely populated urban area.
POGO’s disclosure about Livermore follows testimony by a top DoE official to Congress last week that the department is re-examining the need for some of the costly new security requirements imposed under the 2005 “design basis threat” (DBT), a document that specifies the type and scope of terrorist threats that DoE sites must show they can repel. The official said the terrorist threat to individual DoE sites is changing, and some of the 2005 DBT requirements may be based on outdated intelligence about those threats.
The DoE review of the 2005 DBT comes as some department sites face huge expenditures to bring its sites into compliance with the heightened security requirements, mainly through the hiring of additional guards.
Livermore is among a handful of DoE sites where compliance with the 2005 DBT is particularly challenging because the lab is located so close to residential and commercial areas that there is little or no security buffer zone. That means terrorists could be able to get relatively close to the facility to launch an attack and guards would be constrained in firing back for fear of harming civilians.
POGO officials told reporters Monday that the security waiver for Livermore reflected the realities of Livermore’s vulnerable location. “There’s not a hell of a lot more they can do to protect the site,” said Pete Stockton, a senior investigator for POGO and former DoE official.
POGO officials said the issuance of the security waiver for Livermore was recently confirmed for them by a “senior official” at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous DoE agency that runs the department’s nuclear weapons complex.
The POGO officials said the waiver was justified by NNSA on the grounds that the Livermore lab was classified as a “non-enduring” DoE site, meaning the site eventually would be closed and therefore it would not be cost-effective to spend large amounts of money meeting the enhanced security requirements.
NNSA issued a statement Monday dismissing the POGO report as unnecessarily alarmist and noting that the agency already had committed to removing plutonium and HEU by 2012, meaning security upgrades are neither needed nor sensible.
“They are needlessly trying to alarm people,” NNSA said in its statement. “It does not make sense to spend money on permanent upgrades to facilities that will not need this level of security once the nuclear weapons material is removed, which is scheduled to happen by 2012–just four years from now. In the meantime, extremely high security measures are in place.”
However, POGO said the 2012 removal deadline did not eliminate the current danger posed by Livermore’s plutonium and high-enriched uranium (HEU)–and that NNSA could address the problem by immediately transferring that high-risk weapons-usable material to other DoE sites.
In particular, the group said storage space for the nuclear material was available at the Device Assembly Facility at DOE’s Nevada Test Site, which already is receiving plutonium and HEU from Los Alamos National Laboratory because of security weaknesses at that NNSA weapons facility, which is located in New Mexico.
POGO also questioned NNSA’s commitment to removing the plutonium and HEU, saying the agency actually has gone in the opposite direction in recent years, adding more sensitive nuclear material to the lab’s inventory.
“In just the past three years, DoE has doubled the amount of plutonium allowed to be stored at Livermore…and pursued plans for new plutonium missions at Livermore,” POGO said in a press release accompanying the release of a report on security at the lab, which holds about one ton of weapons-grade plutonium and HEU, according to the watchdog group.
POGO also criticized NNSA for recent measures to upgrade security at Livermore, particularly the deployment of a high-tech Gatling gun capable of firing 4,000 rounds of ammo per minute out to a range of one mile. The group said the weapon was unacceptable in that any accidental firing could spray bullets over several schools located within one mile of the lab.
POGO called for the most sensitive plutonium and HEU to be removed from Livermore immediately, with surplus plutonium going to DoE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. It said plutonium still needed for weapons research could be sent to the Nevada Test Site, and that Livermore scientists could commute there to conduct their work.
The group said there was no national security mission requiring the storage of HEU at Livermore, and that all of that material ought to be sent to NNSA’s Y-12 plant in Tennessee for storage and down-blending into commercial reactor fuel.
POGO’s report followed testimony before members of the House Armed Services Committee last week by Glenn Podonsky, head of DoE’s Office of Health Safety and Security, that he is re-examining the 2005 DBT in light of concerns that some of its requirements may be based on outdated intelligence about terrorist threats to the department’s facilities
Podonsky said the terrorist threat to DoE sites has changed since 2005 and the department needs to determine whether it needs to make the significant expenditures required to bring some of its sites into compliance with the 2005 DBT.
All DoE sites currently meet less stringent security requirements set under a DBT issued in 2003.
“We are taking another hard look at the [2005] DBT,” Podonsky told the strategic forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee in testimony Wednesday on DoE’s fiscal year 2009 budget request. “It is based on intelligence data that is rather dated.
“We do need to re-examine where we are with the design basis threat. It [the terrorist threat] keeps changing.”