The US government started investigation Monday at the top-secret nuclear weapons research facility Los Alamos National Laboratory on the repeated security lapses.

Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow arrived in the lab in New Mexico state Monday, joining Linton Brooks, director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who arrived Sunday, according to reports from New Mexico.

Representatives Joe Barton and Diana DeGette, members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also were expected to arrive at the lab Monday to join the investigation.

The investigation was launched after the mysterious disappearance of two electronic data storage devices earlier this month.

Meanwhile, another security lapse was exposed at the lab. The Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, reported that classifiedinformation had been sent over the lab's unclassified e-mail system 17 times in recent months.

Due to the disappearance of data storage devices, most of the classified work at the lab was shut down over the weekend.

The stand-down order was given by the University of California (UC), operator of the lab for 61 years, after its governing Board of Regents was briefed Friday by lab director Pete Nanos on the latest incident.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham ordered Brooks and McSlarrow to oversee the inquiry. Abraham criticized last week that lab employees for being engaged in "widespread disregard of security procedures."

Los Alamos has been under intense criticism for the past decadedue to a series of security lapses and mismanagement. The incidentrecalls the 1996 case of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-American weapons scientist who was falsely charged with stealing nuclear weapon secrets. Lee ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count of mishandling classified data.

After the Lee case, Los Alamos was again embarrassed when it lost two disk drives that were later discovered behind an office copying machine. In November 2002, allegations surfaced about purchasing fraud, equipment theft and mismanagement.

US Energy Department has decided to put its lab management contract up for bid when the UC contract expires in 2005.

Source: Xinhua