Kenneth Fletcher
NS&D Monitor
5/22/2015
A “package of options” must be assembled to meet the Congressionally mandated goal of producing 80 plutonium pits per year at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to a Congressional Research Service report recently released publically. The National Nuclear Security Administration is moving forward with a new plutonium strategy that involves building modular facilities to house plutonium work at Los Alamos to meet the pit production goal by 2027. “One option by itself will not provide the capacity to manufacture pits at that rate,” states the report by CRS Nuclear Weapons Policy Specialist Jonathan Medalia. “As a result, NNSA faces the prospect of assembling a package of options, whether from the ones presented here or others, and Congress faces the prospect of evaluating, perhaps amending, and approving it. Any package chosen would need to optimize among such goals as margin, cost, worker safety, and throughput.”
In 2012, the Obama Administration suspended work on the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) at Los Alamos, which had been meant to boost pit production. The lab and NNSA have since been developing the outlines of their “Plan B,” a modular approach that involves building smaller, separate facilities, with a much lower price tag than CMRR-NF.
Floor Space and Material at Risk are Limiting Factors
However, in a series of reports, Medalia has raised questions regarding limitations related to the amount of available floor space at LANL’s plutonium facility, PF-4, as well as the limit for material at risk (MAR), which is the amount of radioactive material released in a worst-case accident. The latest report outlines several options related to MAR, including changing how it is calculated. Currently NNSA uses “worst-case values,” but median values could be sufficiently conservative, greatly reducing calculated dose rates, Medalia states. “Yet merely doubling permitted MAR might suffice for producing 80 ppy. Providing this increase through construction at PF-4 could be costly and take years,” according to the report.
Given that the closest offsite facility is a nearby trailer park, moving the trailers could reduce MAR for less cost than construction options, the report states. Another option involves the plutonium-238 in the material. “It accounts for a small quantity of PF-4 plutonium but a quarter of PF-4’s MAR,” the report states. “Building a ‘module’ near PF-4 for plutonium-238 work would free MAR and space in PF-4, so one module might suffice instead of two or three.”
Other possibilities would free up some of the space constraints. That includes “removing contaminated gloveboxes, setting up a production line able to make 50 ppy with one shift per day and operating it with two shifts per day, and building a module for Pu-238 work,” according to the report.
Questions Remain on How to Move Forward
However, numerous questions remain, given that the amount of space and MAR to produce 80 pits per year “have never been calculated rigorously” and there are uncertainties over the timeline for the options, according to Medalia. The report does not make recommendations, but suggests 16 options for further analysis. “In sum, while arriving at a satisfactory package will require complex analyses, many options offer the potential to boost U.S. pit production capacity toward, if not to, the congressionally mandated capacity of 80 pits per year,” the report states. It adds: “At issue for Congress: What are the risks, costs, and benefits of the options? What is the optimum combination of options?”
