--- title: Kitty Litter to Blame for $240 Million Radioactive Leak description: It's a meow-ltdown! canonical: https://time.com/3762776/kitty-litter-radioactive-leak/ author: TIME article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-03-29T23:04:06.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T07:18:10.138Z og:title: Kitty Litter to Blame for $240 Million Radioactive Leak og:description: It's a meow-ltdown! og:url: https://time.com/3762776/kitty-litter-radioactive-leak/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt90864036ad1748ee/698785b1cd6848404509a5dc/cat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: cat og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Kitty Litter to Blame for $240 Million Radioactive Leak twitter:description: It's a meow-ltdown! twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt90864036ad1748ee/698785b1cd6848404509a5dc/cat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Kitty Litter to Blame for $240 Million Radioactive Leak > Sponsored content. 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It curates the day's top headlines with TIME's reporting and analysis across politics, world affairs, business, health and culture. It is free to join at time.com/newsletters. #### How do I sign up for The Brief? The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-brief-2026q3/newsletters?i=eba1912f-4e10-42d7-bc0a-b75766c9a99d&cr=time-nl-brief-2026q3-v1) by [Alex Heigl / People](https://time.com/author/people/) ## Alex Heigl / People Contributor Mar 29, 2015 11:04 PM UTC  What happened What happened Getty Images by [Alex Heigl / People](https://time.com/author/people/) ## Alex Heigl / People Contributor Mar 29, 2015 11:04 PM UTC Last February, a radiation accident occurred at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. A drum containing radioisotopes like plutonium was improperly packaged at the Los Alamos National Laboratory near Santa Fe and ruptured, causing a leak. The incident exposed 22 workers to radiation levels “not expected to threaten their health,” according to the contractor that operates the plant. In September, Energy Department officials estimated the cost of the initial recovery of the dump at $240,000,000 and said it might be two or more years before it’s fully operational again. Investigators have now found the cause of the entire issue: The barrel was packaged with “chemically incompatible” contents – in particular, a brand of cat litter (used to absorb liquids) that caused a chemical reaction and created gases that resulted in the canister’s lid becoming dislodged. A team of federal inspectors released a report last year that identified chronic lapses in safety procedures at Los Alamos, saying “waste processing and safety-related control procedures should have prevented the addition of these potentially incompatible materials,” which again, we’d like to stress, means cat litter. The scariest thing about this story is that they never told us what the right brand of kitty litter to use for radioactive waste packaging. How will we know? _This_ [_story_](http://www.peoplepets.com/people/pets/article/0,,20911127,00.html) _originally appeared in_ [_People.com_](http://www.people.com) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3762776/kitty-litter-radioactive-leak/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3762776/kitty-litter-radioactive-leak/"},"headline":"Kitty Litter to Blame for $240 Million Radioactive Leak","datePublished":"2015-03-29T23:04:06.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T07:18:10.138Z","description":"It's a meow-ltdown!","url":"https://time.com/3762776/kitty-litter-radioactive-leak/","keywords":["Newsfeed","animals"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt90864036ad1748ee/698785b1cd6848404509a5dc/cat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Alex Heigl / People"}],"articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt90864036ad1748ee/698785b1cd6848404509a5dc/cat.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"cat","caption":"cat","creditText":"Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-newsfeed/","name":"Newsfeed"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3762776/kitty-litter-radioactive-leak/","name":"Kitty Litter to Blame for $240 Million Radioactive Leak"}}]}] ```