BWX fined for improperly disassembling nuclear warheads
Employees three times applied too much pressure to a W56 warhead; detonation a real possibility after safety mechanism fails; watchdog group says company forced workers to stay on the job 72 hours each week; BWX to pay $110,000, partly for not properly reporting the incidents
Here is one way to put terrorists out of business: do their work for them. According to the non-profit Project on Government Oversight (PGO), employees at the Amarillo, Texas-based Pantex facility, the country’s only factory for the assembly and disassembly of nuclear weapons, recently applied so much pressure to a warhead that it might have exploded. The “near miss” event, PGO claimed, was due partly to requirements that technicians at the plant work up to 72 hours per week. To support this assertion, PGO also released an anonymous letter from Pantex employees “warning that long hours and efforts to increase output were causing dangerous conditions in the plant,” the Arizona Star reported.
According to government officials, workers on three separate occasions, while attempting to disassemble a W56 warhead (yield: 1,200 kilotons), applied an inappropriate amount of pressure, while at the same time a safety mechanism failed to work. (We are reminded of our mothers’ instruction not to “force it” when putting a model airplane together.) Nevertheless, the Energy Department found, plant operator BWX Technologies “significantly delayed” disclosing the incidents and then submitted a “factually inaccurate and incomplete” report. For this the Energy Department has fined BWX $110,000.
-read more in Jeff Nesmith’s Arizona Star report
