alt Hacker News> I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting
Right? We don't store nuclear waste where I work ... BUT one time we needed to buy a bunch of ethernet cables, basically the same thing. We wrote down our requirements, came up with some options. The engineers evaluated the options before purchasing and checked what we received before installing it. There wasn't even a formal process, it's just ... how you do your job?
Obviously organizational dysfunction is a real thing, particularly at LANL, so I can definitely imagine how this sort of thing can fall through the cracks for various processes. But I feel like but requirements verification should be a rigorously enforced formal procedure before storing nuclear waste in perpetuity.
The difference is that in a large organization the people documenting the procedure, the people doing the procurement, the people receiving the order and the people packing the drums are all different people. Potentially in different buildings. You can't expect the original scientist who wrote the white paper based on experiments in a glovebox to be present every time they pack waste into drums.