Washington — The University of California system has agreed to pay a fine of $2.8-million because large amounts of classified information were removed from Los Alamos National Laboratory and discovered in a subcontractor’s home. The university managed the nuclear-weapons laboratory until June 2006 and remains part of a larger management team.

The university agreed not to legally challenge the fine and to accept responsibility for the violations, the U.S. Department of Energy said in a written statement. The fine, announced in July, originally amounted to $3-million.

The university said in a statement that it strives to provide the strongest security for classified material and “recognizes that further protections could and should have been provided to reduce the opportunity for the cited unauthorized removal.” The statement said the fine will be paid out of the university’s revenues from the management contract.

In October 2006, Los Alamos police officers discovered more than 1,000 pages of classified documents during a drug raid at the trailer of a former worker for a lab subcontractor. The worker later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, saying she had taken the information home to catch up on scanning documents. Another person living in the trailer was the target of the police search.

The university had denied violating security requirements and blamed the subcontractor.

Los Alamos has been plagued by security problems in recent years, which is one reason the Energy Department announced in 2003 that it would open the lab’s management contract for competition for the first time since the lab was created, in 1943, as a top-secret project to develop the atomic bomb. —Jeffrey Brainard