No, it is horrific. The reason we have safety protocols is to avoid hazardous situations which cause harm. Nothing happened in this case, but that's only because of luck. Safety protocols are about reducing risk (the probability of an accident) to minimal levels, and to violate them is to invite disaster because it significantly increases the probability. They are about taking as much human error out of the equation by formalising safe working practices. On the surface, it might not appear to be a "big deal" because everything was OK this time, but actually it means that safety is not being treated seriously and that it's only a matter of time before that carelessness causes a serious accident. That needs nipping in the bud and sorting out at every level of the organisation.

If you've ever worked in an industrial or laboratory setting, you'll be familiar with risk assessments, hazard levels, and the attendant working practices that accompany them. Sometimes it's taken to bureaucratic extremes, but it's always important to follow them strictly, because as soon as you start ignoring them and taking shortcuts, you're no longer working safely and you're endangering yourself and your co-workers. That's complacency, and it's a bad place to be. I've seen a co-worker grow complacent about biohazards, and they ended up in hospital with a nasty tropical parasite infecting them, all because after several years of strict discipline, they grew complacent about the danger because it's invisible and you get sloppy in your well practiced routine (I assume; even they don't know exactly how it happened, but it was almost certainly due to sloppy working practice). The same applies here; this is very dangerous stuff but it looks innocuous and working with it leads to trivialising the danger and working unsafely. In a well managed environment, this should be being picked up on quickly by co-workers and inspections. Where I've worked, any violation would mean a formal report up to line managers and lab managers with appropriate disciplinary action. And I have done so when I encountered it, for the safety of all of us. Safety culture needs to be ingrained so that it's second nature.

One angle to look at this is that "material transfer" is actually the primary activity taking place in most industrial and laboratory settings. When I worked in a food/drink industry lab, the logistics of the whole multi-stage process from input raw materials, processing and production, to packaging materials, packaging, warehousing and distribution were all carefully planned and controlled (by an AS/400). When I worked in pharma, all the compounds were in a central robotic compound library, and everything checked in or out was controlled, and all operations in the laboratories were automated and controlled. What I'm trying to say is that the logistics of material handling, inventory and transfer have been solved in many industries for decades. There's no question of where inventory lies because it's all recorded from start to finish. You don't have a hold up because the warehouse is full, you run out of packaging materials, or there are no empty tanks to fill from the previous step in the pipeline, because you have a total view of the process and can plan all the logistics to manage the process optimally. Random materials are just not lying around to clog up the process. There's a managed process with careful oversight and record keeping, and a safety culture ingrained into all workers and management from the start. LANL seems to be very backward in these respects.