As the division leader for health, safety, and radiation protection at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), I am well aware of public discussion about the laboratory’s safety record and the reasonableness of last summer’s decision to suspend activities here (see Brad Lee Holian’s Opinion piece, Physics Today, December 2004, page 60).
Director G. Peter Nanos said that he suspended operations because he had little confidence that, as an institution, we had sufficiently identified and addressed our risks and potential vulnerabilities. Critics have argued that LANL’s safety record was good enough, and they therefore questioned the logic underlying the director’s actions.
In my opinion, LANL’s safety record is not good enough. The laboratory collectively, and all employees individually, must redouble their efforts to embrace a safety mindset, reduce safety incidents, and strive for a best-in-class record that is immune to debate.
Like most statistics, those relating to safety can be presented in many ways to support just about any message, and a number of attendant complexities are difficult to completely analyze.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s standardized total recordable injury rate, the number of injuries per 100 person-years worked, establishes uniform categories of injuries that allow for comparison of safety rates of businesses that represent the same type of industry and organizational size.
In July 2004, the Department of Energy’s average injury rate for its 27 research contractor organizations was 1.7, compared to LANL’s rate of 1.9. While these data indicate that Los Alamos accident rates hover around the mean for DOE research contractors, it also indicates that we are far from best-in-class. Also, though LANL’s injury rate improved dramatically between 1996 (6.0 injury rate) and 2001 (1.5 injury rate), over the past few years our rate of improvement has not just stagnated, but actually reversed.
As a nuclear laboratory, LANL bears an enormous public trust. Society tends to tolerate accidents resulting from familiar causes such as construction or driving; at the same time, society is intolerant of accidents at a place where the hazards are unfamiliar and potentially catastrophic. The public holds the laboratory to a very high standard of safety, and it’s our job to meet that standard.
In scientific research, we content ourselves with nothing less than best-in-class. Why would we settle for anything less in safety when the stakes—the health and lives of our employees—matter even more?
In hindsight, the statistics paint a revealing picture about safety at Los Alamos. But in the midst of July’s crises and turmoil, what drove Nanos’s decision was a very real concern: his regard for each and every employee, and his knowledge of the human toll that any safety incident takes.
