DNFSB Reports Reveal Issues with Oak Ridge Conduct of Operations
A series of reports released by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board have documented the Oak Ridge plant’s problems in carrying out work procedures and mission protocols this year. For the week ending May 15, the board’s Y-12 site representatives — William Linzau and Rory Rauch – identified a list of additional performance errors and mix-ups in work planning and controls that had occurred during the prior two weeks.
Those issues included:
— Workers failed to “perform procedurally-directed fissile material receipt verifications” in at least two instances in the production organization. As a result of that and a similar issue recorded in April, the Y-12 site manager suspended on-site transfers of fissile material for a couple of weeks. The transfers resumed in early May after the production management responded with enhanced training and other measures.
— At Building 9215, a material clerk loaded an enriched uranium part in a container that was not approved for that loading as noted in nuclear criticality safety requirements.
— An “alarm room officer” failed to implement the required fire patrol after disabling the alarm for a pressure switch on a fire suppression system. According to the report, the officer misread the fire patrol long and thought the fire patrol had already been established.
— Chemical operators “inadvertently placed three metal cans containing fissile material” in a storage locations where they were not allowed because of nuclear criticality safety restrictions. The report noted that a similar error had occurred in October 2014, but apparently the corrective actions taken at that time did not have a lasting impression.
— Utilities operators at Y-12 were not able to complete an annual maintenance task on booster pumps that support the plant’s potable water towers due to multiple work planning and control issues. Those issues included problems with lockout/tagout procedures.
In a report for the week ending May 22, the DNFSB site reps noted that the Feedback and Improvement Working Group (FIWG) had completed its quarterly analysis report on the performance of Consolidated Nuclear Security and made a number of observation involving conduct of operations at Y-12. The FIWG said that the CNS production organization had implemented a leadership training course for supervisors and managers to improve the performance on conduct of operations at Y-12. CNS also completed a “systems review of significant events to identify systemic issues and underlying causes that will be used to inform its performance improvements plans.” The working group noted, “Despite on-going corrective actions, conduct of operations performance did not show significant improvement.”
The rapid change at Y-12 due to the change of contractors over the past year has been cited as a factor in negative performance operations by CNS and others, including the safety board’s site reps.
The staff said the working group also observed: “CONOPS metrics that measure success using statistics based on the number of hours of operation without an event can mask the overall health of the barriers that prevent events.” The DNFSB staff said the working group’s findings were consistent with their own observations.
Mason: Red Team Won’t Be Constrained in Recommendations
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thom Mason, who will head a Red Team review of the Department of Energy’s MOX facility at Savannah River and other options for dispositioning more than 30 tons of surplus weapons-grade plutonium, said the team of experts will not be constrained in its recommendations. He said the team will be about the same size as the one he headed last year that evaluated the uranium operations at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant and came up with a cheaper, quicker alternative to the original big-box plan for the Uranium Processing Facility.
“More than a dozen, less than 20,” Mason said in a telephone interview Thursday after DOE announced plans for the new Red Team. He said the Red Team will have experts from across the DOE complex, taking advantage of scientists and engineers with relevant experience from Los Alamos, Idaho and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. According to the ORNL director, the Red Team roster will include technical experts with knowledge of MOX fuel and fast power reactors, as well as people with experience in construction and startup of nuclear facilities – especially those who’ve built facilities under NRC regulation. There’ll also be a need for people with a perspective on the “international dimensions” in terms of commitments to Russia, Mason said. He said the team likely will include some retirees with valuable expertise and experience.
Mason, who returned to Oak Ridge late Thursday following a trip to Hong Kong for the Gordon Conference on Neutron Scattering, said he hopes to finish assembling the team in the next couple of days. He said he was approached about heading the Red Team by John MacWilliams, senior advisor to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. The team’s report is due to Moniz in early August. That’s an even shorter timeframe than the Red Team review on Y-12 and UPF, but Mason said it’s probably doable because they’re using the same model as before.
Mason said the time-urgent review of plutonium-disposition options will be significantly different from the Red Team he headed last year that looked at enriched uranium operations at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. For last year’s review, he and his team of experts had a very specific mission. They were told to come up with an alternative to a consolidated Uranium Processing Facility, whose costs were spiraling out of control. The Red Team was to make recommendations that would get Y-12 workers out of the antiquated and not-so-safe 9212 uranium complex by 2025 and keep the project’s price tag under $6.5 billion.
Their report, which pushed for increased use of existing infrastructure and phased modules for new construction, has drawn praise as a workable solution for the uranium future at Y-12. According to Mason, there is no specific cost cap on the upcoming review of plutonium disposition options. He said the team will not be conducting a top-to-bottom cost assessment, although he emphasized that cost will be a consideration in every part of the review. The focal point of the team’s work will be a peer review and evaluation of studies that have already been done on MOX and the plutonium-disposition alternatives.
Unlike the uranium production review, the new Red Team hasn’t been told to hit a specific cost target. Instead, the team members evaluate the try to determine whether the MOX disposition pathway, which requires construction of the new facility and other things, is the optimal way to meet U.S. obligations and commitments. “Or,” Mason said, “is there an alternative disposition pathway that would get there faster and more cost-effectively?” He added: “At this point, we’re not constrained in terms of what we might recommend.” No one has been asked to give a “stamp of approval” to anything, Mason said. In fact, he said, it’s not for sure that the team will be able to even reach a consensus on a path forward.
In announcing the Red Team and Mason’s appointment as team leader, DOE said Thursday, "The assessment will address the MOX fuel approach, the downblending and disposal approach, and any other approaches that the team deems feasible and cost effective, taking into account cost, regulatory or other issues associated with a particular approach.” Mason obviously has a busy schedule, and he joked about being asked to do another Red Team so soon on the heels of another major review last year. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said. At the same time, he emphasized that he was willing to spend the time and make it a priority, and other team member felt the same way.
“This is an important issue,” he said. “It’s important to the nation.” He said it’s also important internationally because of U.S. commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reducing the number of weapons and special nuclear materials. Because of the tight budget and uncertainty of future spending levels, Mason said it was important for lab leaders and others throughout the Department of Energy system to be cognizant of spending levels and make every project as cost-effective as possible.
TRU Waste Contract Transition to Take Place in September
The transition of contractors at the Department of Energy’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center is scheduled to take place by September, according to a DOE spokeswoman. As reported earlier, DOE awarded the management contract, valued up to $123.9M, to North Wind Solutions LLC. Lynette Chafin of DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center said the federal agency anticipates that North Wind will begin management of TWPC by the end of August. “A transition period would commence in mid-July,” Chafin said via email.
That schedule apparently depends on whether any of the other six bidders files a protest on the contract award at the Government Accountability Office. The Oak Ridge waste-treatment center processes long-lived radioactive materials and packages them for transport to and disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The contract is currently held by Wastren Advantage Inc.
Complaints about Airborne ‘Irritant’ Resurface at Y-12
Complaints about an airborne “irritant” have been reported again at Y-12’s oldest building. This time, however, employees have reported throat irritation and coughing while walking outside in the vicinity Building 9731 – the original pilot plant for uranium enrichment at the Oak Ridge plant. “Two reports of minor throat irritation and coughing symptoms after walking nearby the building have occurred,” Ellen Boatner, a spokeswoman for Consolidated Nuclear Security, the government’s managing contractor, said in an email response to questions. “All those affected have been evaluated, and it has been determined they have no resulting health issues.”
Beginning in February, when a security police officer reported an airborne concern inside Building 9731, there have been at least five employees who complained of similar symptoms during or after working inside the old building – which was constructed in 1943 as part of the World War II Manhattan Project. Staff members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board reported in February that the cause of the irritation was believed to be “vapors or dust from an activity to process lithium hydroxide.” The work inside Building 9731 was being conducted by the Development Division, which is Y-12’s research organization, the DNFSB memo said.
Steven Wyatt, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office at Y-12, confirmed that Y-12’s Development Division was doing work at the site, but he would not confirm the lithium activity or discuss the operations in any detail. Boatner said Y-12’s industrial hygiene group has been monitoring the situation. As a precautionary measure, she said, the sidewalk near Building 9731 has been cordoned off. “Efforts will continue to identify and eliminate any airborne irritants,” Boatner said in a statement.
Storm Temporarily Disables Spallation Neutron Source
A thunderstorm passing through East Tennessee last weekend temporarily threw the Spallation Neutron Source for a loop and required around-the-clock measures to get it back up and running. At about 1:30 a.m. on June 19, the SNS experienced a “significant power disturbance.” Kevin Jones, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Research Accelerator Division, said the disruption was blamed on lightning likely striking an overhead transmission line at the research center atop Chestnut Ridge.
“The disturbance lasted long enough to trip off the majority of the accelerator systems,” Jones said via email. The accelerator was brought back to operation later that day, but the problem forced the SNS team to a “complete warm up and cool down cycle for the cryogenic moderator system” to make sure that the system’s full performance was recovered, he said. Even though operations were recovered pretty quickly, there was a loss of about 40 hours of research time at the facility, which is a mecca for scientists who want to use the unprecedented pulses of neutron to perform experiments with materials.
The outage affected up to 22 experiments and 65 scientific users, he said. The SNS team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will work with the researchers to replan their experiments as necessary, Jones said. Before the storm, the SNS had been performing “quite well,” Jones said, with a beam power level of 1.15 megawatts and 95 percent availability to users. Research operations at SNS are about to be shutdown for the annual six-week summer maintenance outage on June 28. The plan is to resume operating on Aug. 14.
Plowshares Protesters to Return to Oak Ridge for Hiroshima Remembrance Event
The three Plowshares protesters who broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex on July 28, 2012, and forced dramatic and continuing changes in security throughout the nuclear weapons complex will be making a return visit to Oak Ridge in early August. Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, confirmed that Sister Megan Rice, an 85-year-old Catholic nun, and her two accomplices in peace activism – Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed – have accepted an invitation to attend events surrounding the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan.
The three were arrested hours after they broke into the Oak Ridge plant, cut through four security fences, painted slogans and posted signs with Bible passages, and ultimately splashed human blood on the exterior of the nation’s largest storehouse for bomb-grade uranium. The unprecedented security breach prompted a couple of congressional hearings, cost several Oak Ridge executives their jobs, and resulted in many millions of dollars being spent on retraining, equipment and new security initiatives not only at Y-12 but other high-security facilities associated with the nuclear weapons program.
The three protesters – who called themselves Transform Now Plowshares — were recently released from prison after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned their conviction on sabotage charges. The government decided not to contest the Appeals Court’s ruling. Rice, Walli and Boertje-Obed will be resentenced on other charges – damaging government property – but they’ve reportedly already served enough time for those changes and won’t have to return to prison for the Y-12 deeds.
Hutchison’s peace group has organized protests in Oak Ridge for more than two decades, especially surrounding the anniversary of the Aug. 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. He said there are tentative plans to hold an Aug. 7 event to recognize the three Plowshares protesters and to celebrate their actions on behalf of peace and disarmament. A date for their resentencing hearing has not been set, but Hutchison indicated there is hope that it will be coordinated with their planned visit to the Knoxville area.
CNS COO Urges Employees to Take Self-Critical Approach to Improve Y-12/Pantex
In a June 18 message to employees at the Y-12 and Pantex nuclear weapons plant, Morgan Smith, the chief operating officer for contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security, emphasized the importance of self-criticism in making improvements and he encouraged workers to use “deep introspection” in what he described as a never-ending journey toward excellence. The contractor, which took over the combined management of the two plants in mid-2014, has faced numerous operating challenges and Smith and others have attributed some of the problems – including ongoing conduct of operations issues at Y-12 – to ongoing changes associated with the contractor transition at the sites.
In his “CNS Connect” message to employees, Smith noted the company’s positive response to a couple of recent issues at Pantex, including an early-May safety pause and the Code Blue situation that brought extra scrutiny to issues with the potential to impact the plant’s weapons mission and later drew praise from NNSA Administrator Frank G. Klotz. Smith also discussed highlights of the contractor’s recent self-assessment that was sent to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office a couple of months ago. That assessment, at least in part, dealt with the ongoing concerns regarding operational issues at Y-12. He said “self-critical, unvarnished” self-exams are “appropriate and necessary” to improve.
While acknowledging there have been problems, the CNS executive said there has also been some progress. He said the pursuit of excellence “is a journey that requires continuous dedication and focus.” He cited three areas that CNS “openly identified” in its report to the NNSA:
— The need to improve working conditions “so they are conducive to performance excellence.” Initially, Smith said, that will mean more attention to cleanliness and clutter reduction, 7S work process improvements and “enhancement” of waste management capabilities. He urged employees to contribute to housekeeping upgrades, cleaning and better organizing work spaces.
— Lack of communication. “Given the pace of change over the last 10 months, it is clear that managers have not been provided with sufficient information to most effectively answer employee questions and provide appropriate perspective on what is coming next,” Smith said. He took personal blame for not spending enough time “explaining where we have been and where we are headed.” He said he is meeting with small groups of first-line supervisors and managers to given them better info to share with employees.
— The impact of distractions. Smith said the “magnitude of changes” created during the transition of contractors has had an impact in the workplace. “Chief among those distractions has been changes to the benefit plans,” he said. Smith said CNS has already made some changes to get rid of problem areas and will continue to look at ways to modify the benefit plans “to ensure we appropriately support all employees in the conduct of our mission.”
