An Energy Department investigation released Friday found severe security weaknesses at the Los Alamos National Laboratory but said the New Mexico facility did not lose secret nuclear weapons data last year.
In a report harshly critical of the University of California, which has managed Los Alamos for six decades, Energy Department officials said two classified computer disks believed to be missing from the lab last summer never actually existed.
But in what it called the largest financial penalty ever imposed on a national lab, the department announced that it had slashed UC's management fee for running the facility by $5.1 million, leaving the university with only about a third of the $8.7-million payment for 2004.
Although there was no loss of classified material at the lab, "the cultural weaknesses revealed by this investigation are severe and must be corrected," the report said. "The root cause of the problems was a widespread ... disregard for safety and security."
Lab officials reported in July that two classified computer disks appeared to be missing, which, along with a laser accident that injured a student intern, triggered a shutdown of most of the lab's operations. The closure continued in large part through the rest of 2004, and one key area of the weapons directorate remains shuttered, although a lab spokesman said Friday that all sections should be restarted by next week.
In announcing the penalty, National Nuclear Security Administration chief Linton Brooks expressed concern about the weaknesses revealed by the incident, in which security bar codes were created for nonexistent disks.
Such lapses "are absolutely unacceptable, and the University of California must be held accountable for them," said Brooks, whose agency, a semiautonomous arm of the Energy Department, oversees the nation's nuclear weapons facilities.
UC officials accepted responsibility Friday for the lab's problems but said they had since been corrected in a detailed review of safety and security procedures.
"We got walloped," UC spokesman Chris Harrington said. "Unfortunately, we deserve this, but what we have done now is correct the problems and put systems in place so we don't take this type of hit again."
Harrington said the penalty would not affect the overall operations of the university.
