KMAX: News of the West

WASHINGTON (AP) After a monthlong stop, work with removable computer disks like those missing at the Los Alamos lab has resumed at the University of California's other federal nuclear weapons lab, officials said Wednesday.

Department of Energy officials recertified work to begin at six of 34 divisions at the , Lawrence Livermore lab in Livermore, Calif., on Tuesday morning, lab spokeswoman Susan Houghton said. Work is expected to restart at the remaining divisions in coming weeks, she said.

Use of the disks known as ``controlled removable electronic media,'' or CREM, was stopped at DOE facilities nationwide July 23 after two of the disks believed to contain classified information went missing earlier in the month at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. That investigation remains open, although Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said earlier this month that it was possible the disks may in fact never have been missing at all.

DOE facilities that use CREM have been conducting inventories of the disks and reporting back to the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration to get recertified to resume work with them. Work has resumed at various sites in addition to Lawrence Livermore, including the Savannah River nuclear facility in South Carolina and the Pantex facility in Texas.

National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Bryan Wilkes said he couldn't give details of when CREM work would restart at all of the up to two dozen facilities where it was stopped.

``There is no specific timetable or due date. We have been in a rolling restart for the past two to three weeks, and each site has been announcing it locally,'' Wilkes said in an e-mail reply.

Houghton said no missing disks or other problems have been found at Lawrence Livermore.

``So far we've found we're doing things right and we're going to do whatever the secretary and NNSA want us to do to restore faith that our employees can handle this information and handle it correctly,'' she said.