"We haven't received any new allegations," said spokesman Anson Franklin of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The Denver Post reported Wednesday that a Department of Energy employee is seeking whistle-blower status to go public with allegations about "vulnerabilities and deficiencies" of nuclear weapons convoys, laboratories and plants.

The House intelligence committee found his charges about convoys to have merit, but handed the case over to the House Armed Services Committee in June. An Armed Services Committee spokesman on Wednesday would say only that staffers "are looking into it."

Nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons waste are routinely hauled around the nation by the DOE. The agency recently began hauling 6 tons of weapons-grade plutonium from the decommissioned Rocky Flats plant northwest of Denver to South Carolina.

The worker's name and the details of his charges have not been made public. His lawyer wants him to be granted whistle-blower status to keep him from being fired.

But Ron Timm, a former contract adviser to senior DOE officials on security who has since become a vocal agency critic, said he believes he knows who the whistle-blower is.

Timm declined to name the employee and said he hadn't talked to him directly. But he said the circle of DOE whistle-blowers is small and he is certain the author of the recent complaint is a senior agency employee who helped evaluate the agency's nuclear weapons transportation program.

The evaluations found weaknesses and deficiencies in nearly every category of preparedness, Timm said.

Timm said he and the employee were both in a 1998 meeting when DOE security director Joe Mahaley was told that the division could not meet the "low risk" standard the government uses to measure the security of nuclear transport. The "low risk" standard represents the level of risk the government accepts, Timm explained.

After that meeting, Timm said, the transportation security program won a "war games" test in 1999, but was later found to have "cheated" by obtaining the mock terrorists' attack plan.

Those allegations were included in a blistering 2001 report by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group. Officials at DOE and the National Nuclear Safety Administration say the report is misleading and based on poor information.

Mike Soraghan's e-mail address is msoraghan@denverpost.com .