Report: DOE facilities fail mock attacks

Thursday, Oct. 11, 2001 | 10:22 a.m.

Serious security flaws have left material used in the production of nuclear weapons vulnerable to terrorism, but consolidating plutonium and uranium for storage at the Nevada Test Site or underground in New Mexico could reduce the risk, a report said.

The Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan watchdog group based in Washington, released to the public Tuesday a 200-page report on security lapses and other unclassified information.

More than 50 percent of the time, DOE facilities in Colorado, New Mexico and California failed mock terrorist attacks, according to the report.

The Project on Government Oversight began preparing the report eight months ago, Danielle Brian, POGO executive director, said. About a dozen whistle-blowers contributed unclassified information, which provided evidence regarding the vulnerability of sites housing materials used in the production of nuclear weapons.

In a prepared statement Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the House National Security Subcommittee, said he would initiate an investigation into the findings.

"I am deeply troubled about a recent report indicating DOE still fails facility security training exercises more than 50 percent of the time even though the department is aware when the facility security training exercise is to take place," Shays said. "We want to know what DOE is doing to resolve this deficiency, both in the short term and in the long term."

A means of securing nuclear weapons materials is consolidation, the report says, adding that it could take several years to complete such a move.

Locations such as an underground bunker at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico or the Device Assembly Facility, a secure complex about the size of a dozen football fields at the Nevada Test Site -- about 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas -- provide options for housing the material.

The $100 million Nevada facility was constructed for the assembly of nuclear devices tested at the site; underground experiments were halted in 1992.

Another alternative outlined in the report would involve immobilizing the materials in glass blocks at the DOE's Savannah River, S.C., site. The process, however, would take years to complete.

Nine of the government's nuclear weapons facilities, including the Test Site, are within 100 miles of cities with populations of more than 75,000, the report said.

The report, referring to DOE documents, cited several instances in which security at nuclear weapons facilities had been breached.

For example, in a security exercise at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, U.S. Army Special Forces seized heavy weapons-grade uranium, which they wheeled off in a garden cart. And at a DOE plant in Rocky Flats, Colo., a Navy SEAL team posing as terrorists cut a hole in a chain-link fence and took enough plutonium to construct several nuclear bombs, according to the report. Security personnel at the plant first saw the SEAL team as it was leaving the site.