The State - News from Jan. 2, 1989

Part of an artillery shell containing conventional explosives and low-grade uranium was accidentally shipped to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the shell sat for four days before someone realized what it was. The shell had been shipped to the lab, located east of Oakland, as unclassified freight from the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, where a clerk had gotten it mixed up with another shipment, officials said. The risk of a conventional explosion was very low and the device was incapable of a nuclear explosion, according to officials at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.