Los Alamos National Laboratory

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has covered defense, intelligence and foreign policy for years.

He knows better than most in how to read between the lines and getting to the top of a sensitive subject.

In his latest blog, Pincus took a look at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s performance evaluations of the nation’s eight nuclear weapons laboratories and production facilities, including Los Alamos.

In fact, it was Los Alamos that he put under his microscope.

In the face of impending litigation, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) released the Performance Evaluation Reports for its eight nuclear weapons sites including Los Alamos Wednesday.

On March 28, Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in federal court in Albuquerque.

“These reports are the government’s scorecard for awarding tens of millions of dollars to nuclear weapons contractors, and were previously available to the public until 2009,” Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s Jay Coghlan said. “However, since that time the NNSA has withheld them in a general move toward less contractor accountability. We sought to help reverse that wrong direction through our litigation.”

Los Alamos National Laboratory’s database of environmental monitoring data is now directly viewable by the public.

“Intellus New Mexico,” the new, web-based application, will display the same internal data that Laboratory scientists and regulatory agencies see and use for environmental analysis and monitoring of the LANL site.  The new system contains more than 9 million records, including historical data as well as a near-real-time view of ongoing data collection activities.

Intellus NM replaces an older database of lab-related environmental data, known as RACER.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory confirmed what caused the chemical reaction in a bottle containing liquid drawn for a 60-year-old cylinder at Technical Area 21, which caused lab officials to summon Hazmat and emergency personnel March 14.

LANL spokesperson Colleen Curran said this week that the chemical that reacted was nickel tetracarbonyl, which was used in a variety of industrial processes.

According to Websters Dictionary, nickel tetracarbonyl is a volatile flammable poisonous liquid compound Ni(CO)4 obtained by passing carbon monoxide over finely divided nickel and readily decomposed by heating.