Waste at Los Alamos Missing

Los Alamos National Laboratory is missing drums of radioactive waste. After
a four-month long inventory conducted at Los Alamos, 38 containers of
radioactive waste are unaccounted-for.

Some lab directors believe that the barrels are not missing and it is a
problem with record keeping. "Obviously we're very concerned because this
does indicate we do have some historic inventory issues," LANL spokesman
James Rickman said.

The missing drums are part of 20,000 containers of highly toxic and
dangerous transuranic waste stored at the lab's Area G. The discrepancy was
announced in a memo released May 4 by the Defense Nuclear Safety Board.

Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group, released a written statement
saying that the missing material was enough to make an advanced nuclear
weapon. Mello also said that the broader issue is that Los Alamos "has
thousands of drums of plutonium-contaminated waste that is going nowhere
fast, and they're making more of it and they have big waste-handling problems."

Courtesy of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation