Los Alamos National Laboratory management contractor Triad National Security must quickly change the issues-management practices it inherited from its predecessor to prevent problems with plutonium facilities from spiraling out of control and derailing planned production of nuclear-weapon cores starting in 2026, the Energy Department said in a report Monday.
The report comes from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Safety and Environmental Assessments, a branch of the agency’s Office of Enterprise Assessments.
The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is on the hook to annually produce no fewer than 80 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The agency plans to make 30 of those at Los Alamos using the upgraded PF-4 Plutonium Facility.
But there are “significant weaknesses in the LANS IM [issues-management] process and institutional behaviors that have allowed identified problems to go uncorrected, problem recurrences to be routinely accepted, and corrective actions to often be delayed for years,” according to the report.
Issues management is DOE’s process for cataloging things that go wrong at agency sites. It involves describing both the problem and its fixes so that personnel can avoid similar flubs in the future.
The Enterprise Assessments office warned that weak issue management practices “if uncorrected, can allow layers of defense for nuclear safety to degrade to the extent they did leading to the pause in July 2013 of key fissile material operations in the Plutonium Facility at LANL for over four years.”
That pause happened under previous lab prime Los Alamos National Security (LANS): a group led by the University of California and Bechtel with BWX Technologies and AECOM. NNSA headquarters ordered the pause after lab personnel violated safety procedures intended to prevent an accidental, uncontrolled nuclear criticality.
“Having adopted the LANS IM process with only minor changes, Triad is now responsible for correcting the weaknesses in that process and in the associated institutional behaviors identified in this report,” the Enterprise Assessments office wrote. “Triad’s development and implementation of its strategic initiatives to improve IM and to ‘achieve culture change with an emphasis on organizational learning’ will be key to safely supporting increased production rates of plutonium pits through 2030.”
Triad is led by the Battelle Memorial Institute, the University of California, and Texas A&M University, with integrated industry subcontractors Fluor and Huntington Ingalls Industries.
In its solicitation for a management contractor, the NNSA required the winning bidder to change the “culture” at the lab, which the agency blamed for a series of high-profile mistakes with defense materials and nuclear waste.
The most visible was the lab’s failure in 2014 to properly package legacy plutonium-contaminated waste. The waste later reacted with packing material at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., to cause a small explosion that spread contamination into the deep-underground disposal facility, shutting it down for nearly three years.
After that, Los Alamos National Security was busted for shipping plutonium by air when safety standards required ground shipping.
The laboratory did not respond to a request for comment.
