NS&D Monitor
10/3/2014
UPF Procurement Chief Staying at Y-12 After All
After conflicting reports over the past month, it looks like Rich Brown will be staying in Oak Ridge after all and oversee the procurement activities for the Uranium Processing Facility and/or its follow-on projects. Just a few days after UPF Project Director Brian Reilly sent out a message announcing that Brown was leaving UPF to take a Becthel assignment in the United Kingdom, and would be replaced in the UPF role by Mark Swager, another Becthel veteran, a spokesman confirmed that Brown was staying put.
Jason Bohne, communications chief for Consolidated Nuclear Security, the managing contractor at Y-12 and Pantex, acknowledged that Brown was staying in Oak Ridge. But Bohne declined to specify what position Brown would hold or confirm whether or not Swager would still be associated with the UPF project. There is reportedly a proposal on the table for Brown and Swager to share the procurement roles for the evolving project to modernize the uranium operations at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. However, there has been no response to questions about the CNS plans for the key project role.
Calciner Project at Y-12 to Cost About $40M
As the National Nuclear Security Administration moves ahead with the Red Team’s alternative strategy to the Uranium Processing Facility, some details—and even preliminary costs—are starting to emerge. One of the primary efforts at the Y-12 National Security Complex, with the support and direction of NNSA Uranium Program Manager Tim Driscoll, is to move quickly with production alternatives to help move work out of the age-vulnerable 9212 uranium-processing complex.
According to a newly released Aug. 29 memo by staff of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, Driscoll was at Y-12 to review plans for some of the projects—including the calciner and electro-refining uranium processing technologies. Driscoll has spent significant time at Y-12 over the past couple of months to take a good look at risk-reduction plans and the response from Consolidated Nuclear Security—the government’s managing contractor.
Project Cost Range Estimated at $20 to $79 Million
The DNFSB report said Driscoll had issued a letter to Steve Erhard, the NNSA Production Office Manager, approving Critical Decision-0 (Mission Need) for the calciner project at Y-12. “The rough order of magnitude total project cost is estimated between $20 million and $79 million with a point estimate of $40 million,” the memo stated. “In the letter the UPM delegates the NNSA associate administrator for infrastructure and safety to serve as the acquisition executive until CD-1 determination.”
NNSA spokesman Steven Wyatt said the calciner is intended to convert low-equity liquids containing uranium to an oxide. It is a system to convert low-equity material to a safer form that can be disposed of as waste or used in other processes, he said. Earlier reports had indicated that the Y-12 planned to do some of the alternative production processes in Building 9215 (near the 9212 facility), but the NNSA has not confirmed that the calciner project for processing enriched uranium will be housed there.
Spallation Neutron Source to Remain Shut Down Into Late October
The Spallation Neutron Source, a signature research facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has encountered more problems, and the shutdown of operations—which began in early September after the premature failure of a target vessel—will now be extended until mid- to late-October because of a water leak in a section of the linear accelerator. About 150 experiments will have to be rescheduled, and the full impact of the problems has yet to be fully assessed.
The problems began only about a month after the SNS operations were restarted following a five-week downtime in the summer for maintenance and repairs. A new stainless steel vessel, which holds the mercury target, was installed in September, and scientific investigators will take a long look at what caused the premature failure of this previous vessel, which, ironically, was of a new design that was intended to extend its lifetime.
Water Leak Adds to Problems for Facility
Before the SNS could be restarted, however, a water leak in a section of the facility’s linear accelerator added to the concerns at the facility on Chestnut Ridge, a couple of miles north of the main ORNL campus. About 150 experiments—involving an unspecified number of researchers—will have to be rescheduled, but ORNL spokesman David Keim said all scientists who previously had experiments planned at the SNS will ultimately receive their beam time at the research facility.
The water leak affected a section of the accelerator known as the Medium Energy Beam Transport, which is located near the front end of the accelerator and contains equipment that prepares the “phase, energy and focus” of the particle beam for injection into the linear accelerator, according to Keim. “A water-cooled chopper target device failed and allowed water to leak into the MEBT vacuum enclosure, soaking equipment,” he said.
Keim said the leak did not result in any safety or environmental problems, but he acknowledged that the problem will take time to resolve. “The MEBT is a complex assembly, and many removable parts must be disassembled and dried out in vacuum ovens,” he said. “Parts that cannot be removed must be dried out using local heating techniques at moderate temperatures. This will be a time-consuming process.”
Facility Will Meet Some FY 2014 Goals
The problems occurred toward the end of the fiscal year, and Keim said the SNS will still meet some of its goals for FY 2014. “Fortunately, we had already met our fiscal 2014 goals for both unique users and operating hours at SNS before the target failed,” the spokesman said. The 2014 goal for unique users at SNS was 780, and the goal for neutron production hours was 4,230, Keim said.
There is no way, however, that the SNS will reach its reliability standards. “SNS’s availability for FY14 is expected to be 83.7 percent (the target is 90 percent),” Keim said. “That’s the percentage of availability compared to the published schedule for neutron production, not including maintenance periods or startup time. SNS availability up to the time of the target failure was above 91 percent; each day the facility is off incurs a loss of about 0.5% in overall availability.” Keim also confirmed that the Spallation Neutron Source did not meet its availability goal in FY 2013 because of multiple target failures during the first part of the fiscal year.
