Study finds quake risk at Los Alamos

A big earthquake and resultant fire could trigger potentially deadly releases of radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to "major deficiencies" in the nuclear weapons lab's safety planning, federal safety experts warned Tuesday. The warning from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was sent to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, urging him to "execute both immediate and long-term actions." The lab, atop a mesa west of Santa Fe, is the nation's primary plutonium fabrication facility for nuclear weapons and is believed to house thousands of pounds of plutonium at a complex known as TA-55. In the course of designing a new building near the plutonium facility, engineers discovered that a previously known fault has the potential for causing far greater ground movement than they had calculated...read more