Hensel Phelps, a construction subcontractor working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, recently completed concrete placements for four warehouses that will provide more than a football field’s worth of additional storage capacity and workspace.
Approximately 5,000 cubic yards of concrete were laid for the foundation on June 15, a milestone the lab announced only last week.
The 80,000 square-foot collection of warehouse space — an area about one-and-a-half times the size of a football field — will provide a non-radiological space for workers to receive, inspect, test, store, and assemble glove boxes and other equipment headed to the lab’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility. The new structures will help ensure that the Laboratory has the necessary glove boxes and other equipment in place to support the mission to manufacture at least 30 pits per year sometime after 2026.
With dozens of glove boxes and other pieces of equipment required to fulfill the pit production mission, the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project (LAP4) team needs not just storage space but also workspace — and plenty of it, the lab said in a statement.
“This space will be critical to the pit mission, providing workers with safe, secure and modern workspaces where they can inspect, store, preassemble and cold test equipment before sending it into the Plutonium Facility,” said Tom Bratvold, the lab’s senior director of line item projects, who oversees the LAP4 portfolio, noting that the team is leveraging lessons learned from past projects.
Over the next few months, the subcontractor will construct all four warehouse frames and begin installing equipment to support lighting, security, and fire safety.
The first completed warehouse is scheduled to begin receiving equipment in the fall of 2023. The remaining three warehouses are expected to be in service in 2024.
