Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
5/23/2014
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board wants Los Alamos National Laboratory to take more time to restart operations at its Plutonium Facility, which has been shut down since last summer due to criticality safety concerns. In a May 16 letter to National Nuclear Security Administration chief Frank Klotz, DNFSB Chairman Peter Winokur said the Board had been informed that Los Alamos National Laboratory will not conduct criticality safety evaluations (CSEs) for higher-risk operations before restarting work at the facility, which the Board said had been planned. Winokur requested a briefing from the NNSA within 14 days on “how the NNSA will ensure that adequate controls will be identified as the laboratory” restarts higher-risk work at the facility.
The facility was shut down in June of last year, though some lower-risk operations have restarted. “Department of Energy directives and industry consensus standards require that CSEs unambiguously demonstrate how fissionable material operations will remain subcritical under both normal and credible abnormal conditions,” Winokur said. “These CSEs identify controls to ensure safe operation.” Los Alamos this week declined to provide an update on the status of efforts to restart operations at the Plutonium Facility, referring questions to NNSA, which did not respond. At a Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing in April, Los Alamos Director Charlie McMillan offered no timetable for the restart of activities. “We are making significant progress in resolving the criticality safety concerns at our plutonium facility that caused us to pause operations,” he said. “We have improved our criticality safety posture and are in the process of resuming our important activities and deliverables.”
Criticality Scare Reported at PF-4
At the same time, an April 25 DNFSB site representative report released this week revealed that there had been a criticality scare at the Plutonium Facility. According to the report, workers found neutron measurements that exceeded allowable criticality safety evaluation limits by a factor of nearly two when performing measurements on a standard waste box. Combined with measurements of the items inside the box, measured values exceeded limits by factor of nearly four, the DNFSB said. “Workers took the correct immediate actions to secure the area, back off, and make notifications,” the DNFSB said.
Los Alamos and the NNSA did not respond to a request for comment, but the DNFSB said during a review of the incident, facility personnel “questioned the adequacy of the calibration of the equipment and agreed to reconvene to determine a path forward for confirming the contents of the SWB. The Site Representatives note that critique personnel did not bring or review as part of the critique the calibration procedure, the procedure for assaying the waste, or the procedure for loading the SWB.”
NNSA APM to Manage Pu Capabilities Modernization
The NNSA’s Office of Acquisition and Project Management will manage efforts to modernize Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium capabilities, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in a recently released memo. According to the April 11 DNFSB site representative weekly report, released last week, laboratory and Los Alamos Field Office personnel have begun to establish integrated project teams and APM will provide an execution plan by June 30 for the three-phase strategy, which involves outfitting space in the existing Radiological Laboratory Utility Office Building and repurpose space in the existing Plutonium Facility to make up for the deferral of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility project.
The DNFSB also said that a March 27 memo from acting NNSA Administrator Bruce Held “included a reaffirmation of the commitment to cease programmatic operation in the CMR building by the end of calendar year 2019 and notes that all 3 phases of the plutonium strategy will be executed in a manner fully compliant with DOE Order 413.3B, Program and Project Management for the Acquisition of Capital Assets.” Los Alamos referred questions to the NNSA, and the NNSA did not respond to a request for comment.