Part One: Don’t blame the security guard at Y-12

But five months prior to the breach at Y-12, testimony by Gene Aloise before the House Subcommittee on Strategic Forces of the Committee on Armed Services, documents more than ten years of serious security and safety problems at Y-12 and other facilities under the NNSA, using various private contractors (Observations on NNSA’s Management and Oversight of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, Statement of Gene Aloise, Director Natural Resources and Environment, United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-12-473T, 2/16/12).

The testimony of Mr. Aloise, GAO’s Director of Natural Resources and Environment, focused upon a decade of cost and schedule overruns on a number of projects by private contractors under the oversight of NNSA, but the GAO also found that, “NNSA’s oversight of safety and security in the nuclear security enterprise has also been questioned.” Among system-wide safety and security problems documented in nuclear facilities supervised by the NNSA in numerous sites are those at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories near San Francisco.  For safety and security reasons, the nuclear facilities at Los Alamos were shut down in 2004, while in 2005 the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories were also closed.

Mr. Aloise’s testimony documented that NNSA was in fact originally created to fix crucial problems at the Department of Energy (DOE).  “For example,” said Mr. Aloise, “we have designated DOE’s management of its contracts as an area at high risk of fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement because of the department’s record of inadequate management and oversight of its contractors.  In January 1995, we reported that DOE’s laboratories did not have clearly defined missions that focus their considerable resources on accomplishing the department’s changing objectives and national priorities.”  Subsequently, Congress in 2000 signed on to a new “semi-autonomous agency,” the NNSA, to “… fix security problems at the national laboratories.”

While Mr. Aloise testified that the NNSA had made progress in resolving some problems, “NNSA and the DOE’s Office of Environmental management remain on our high-risk list.” And NNSA, which in 2011 had a budget of $10.5 billion, almost “…40% of DOE’s total budget,” has itself become the locus of security and safety mismanagement with regard to private contractors.

For example, the failure of the physical security systems that in part allowed three senior citizens to break into what had once been considered “one of the most secure facilities in the United States” (Friedman,”Inquiry into the Security Breach at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Y-12 National Security Complex”) does not appear to be an issue unique to Y-12, but one present at least one other NNSA site. In his testimony, Mr. Aloise referred to a 2009 GAO report documenting the “numerous and wide-ranging security deficiencies at Livermore,” particularly identifying Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s physical security systems including problematic alarms and sensors.

In fact, at least two years prior to the breach of Y-12, sensors surrounding the high security zone there set off false alarms on a daily basis.  This in part may explain the lax reaction of WSI-Oakridge security personnel the night of the breach, when the alarms sounded yet again (see “Security lapses at nuclear complex identified two years before break-in,” Washington Post, 17 August 2012). 

Additionally, Mr. Aloise documented in his testimony that in 2008 his office reported “significant security problems at Los Alamos had received insufficient attention.” This report, according to Mr. Aloise’s testimony, focused upon the Los Alamos site’s failure to securely store classified parts and to protect information on the site’s classified computer network.  Furthermore, this same report states that though Los Alamos had taken steps to implement initiatives to address recognized security concerns, they had still, “…not developed long-term strategic framework necessary to ensure that its fixes would be sustained over time.”

Though the lone security guard at Y-12 has become a convenient media scapegoat, it now appears that the now notorious breach of Y-12 by Sister Megan Rice and her confederates cannot be blamed on the alleged poor performance of one security guard. The larger truth is that the breach at Y-12 reflects system-wide security and safety concerns at nuclear facilities under NNSA.  The monumental breach at Y-12 is best understood as the end result of long standing management and organizational failures within and between DOE, NNSA, and NNSA’s private contractors. The NNSA, in fact, appears burdened by many of the same issues it was created in 2000 to resolve. 

Robert Lee Maril, a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University is the author ofThe Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border. He blogs at leemaril.com.  Rachael Lee is a graduate student in Sociology at East Carolina University. This is Part One of a three part series looking at the broader implications of the security breach at Y-12