Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Los Alamos National Laboratory announced on its website that it has resumed the troubled Nuclear Material Safeguards and Security Upgrade Project at Technical Area 55 and it is shooting for a completion date in September.

Workers from the laboratory and four subcontractors will complete construction and commissioning of the critical security project in the September timeframe, managers said.

“We’ve mobilized the subcontractors and will have two phases of construction,” said project manager Ty Troutman. “The first starts in February, and it involves things that are not impacted by the weather. I expect a full restart in the late March timeframe.”

Originally, the system was supposed to cost $213 million, but cost overruns increased the project to $254 million, according to a memo written by Lab Director Charlie McMillan to employees. The revised cost is now $244 million, according to lab spokesman Fred DeSousa.

According to officials, the lab discovered and reported to the NNSA a construction defect from the 2010 timeframe, and a pair of separate technical issues, resulting in a completion delay for the TA-55 Plutonium Facility security perimeter upgrade project.

The lab sought legal counsel to help deal with the original botched construction of the project.

Nuclear watchdog groups met in Livermore, Calif., this week to discuss a federal proposal they say would allow the transport weapons-grade plutonium from Los Alamos to California.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s Jay Coghlan, who was on the panel, said he and Tri-Valley CAREs Executive Director Marylia Kelley were in Washington D.C. to discuss the plan with Don Cook, the head of NNSA Defense Programs.

“We stand behind the fact this plan indeed exists, which NNSA now seems to be backpedaling from,” Coghlan said.
Kelley told the San Jose Mercury News that although no plan has been formalized, the idea has been discussed by U.S. Department of Energy officials and in documents from the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“There’s no question that this is the proposal,” Kelly told the newspaper. “What would be the fair thing to say is that the final decision hasn’t been made.”

NNSA spokesman Joshua McConaha said such a plan does not exist for now.

Court papers allege that somebody fraudulently obtained more than $1 million in parts from Dell Computers by making hundreds of calls while pretending to place orders for Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico.

The Albuquerque Journal reports that the alleged fraud reportedly started in 2007 and continued until 2010.

The case was turned over to the Secret Service that year after a Dell security investigator contacted Albuquerque police.

Two Albuquerque men were indicted last May on 131 state counts each of fraud up to $20,000. Ronald Campus and Allan Friedt have pleaded not guilty.

The newspaper reported that a caller who identified himself as Andy Tyler made more than 600 calls to Dell between 2007 and 2009, using serial numbers of the lab computers to place orders.

It appears a Dell Computers security agent broke the scheme.

According to the affidavit obtained by the newspaper:

The U.S. Secret Service got the case in February 2010 from the Albuquerque Police Department, which had been contacted by Don Samuels, a Dell security investigator.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have developed a technique for quick detection of live pathogens in the field. The advance could prove to be a game-changer in terms of being able to rapidly identify the source of food-borne illnesses such as E. coli. Identification of bacteria in a complex environment is currently scientifically challenging.

Current detection and diagnostic techniques are inadequate in major public health emergencies, such as outbreaks of food-borne illness. Finding the source of live pathogens in the suspected food supply requires days of laboratory culture.

LANL’s new method eliminates the need for laboratory culture and speeds the process. The technique relies on bacteria being critically dependent upon the key nutrient iron. The bacteria synthesize and release sequestering agents, called siderophores, into their environment to bind iron tightly for subsequent uptake. This process occurs only in live, intact bacteria.

The LANL team created a method to use bacterial siderophores for selective, rapid identification of viable bacteria in their surroundings.