The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has suggestions for avoiding uranium-related fires once the Uranium Processing Facility in Tennessee starts up and wants the Department of Energy to explain what it’s doing to prevent them, according to a letter published this week.
“The Board believes that Y-12 can improve the site’s safety posture by ensuring that uranium pyrophoric and chemical reactivity hazards are adequately addressed consistent with Department of Energy guidance,” reads the Nov. 8 letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm to Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Chair Joyce Connery. “Additionally, Y-12 should consider revisiting its control strategies for new process technologies, including those to be installed in the Uranium Processing Facility, to ensure that facility worker hazards related to uranium pyrophoricity are addressed.”
The DNFSB gave DOE 120 days from receipt of the letter to turn in the written report and final briefing. That would be mid-March, if the 120 days include weekends and federal holidays, or mid-May, if the 120 days include only business days.
Right now, Y-12 “ does not adequately identify uranium chemical reactivity hazards,” the board wrote in a 13-page report appended to its letter to Granholm.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is overhauling Y-12, the agency’s uranium hub for nuclear-weapons, by building the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) to replace Building 9212 as the main factory for weapon secondary stages.
As part of the overhaul, the agency is replacing uranium furnaces and building new equipment to purify the fissile material.
UPF itself has fallen two years behind schedule — it was supposed to be finished by Dec. 2025 — and the National Nuclear Security Administration acknowledged this summer that the site’s planned electrorefining equipment, chip-melting furnaces and calciner would also be delayed.
There will be some contractual stability at Y-12 at least the next couple of years. The National Nuclear Security Administration this year extended the Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security, giving the team at least two more years to manage Y-12 and its affiliated site, the Pantex Plant in Texas, and as many as five more years to manage Y-12.
Bechtel is building UPF under a subcontract to Consolidated Nuclear Security.
