NNSA, UC Reach Settlement On Los Alamos Lab Security Breach

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – The National Nuclear Security Administration accepted a 2.8 million-dollar settlement offer today from the University of California over a security breakdown at Los Alamos National Laboratory last year.

The NNSA says that under the settlement, the university won’t not seek a judicial review of the penalty and accepted responsibility for the violations.

The amount of the settlement is slightly less than the 3 million dollar civil penalty the NNSA had imposed in September on the university.

The university was the sole manager of the northern New Mexico nuclear weapons laboratory for the Department of Energy until June 2006.

The penalty stems from an October 2006 incident in which Los Alamos police discovered more than 1,000 pages of classified documents and several computer storage devices during a drug bust at the trailer of a former worker for a lab subcontractor.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)