Los Alamos National Laboratory has hired enough criticality safety personnel to support planned manufacturing of nuclear-weapon cores at the New Mexico laboratory, but staff churn among these crucial workers is more common than the lab believes, a new DOE review said.
Lab management and operations contractor Triad National Security “has adequately managed the training and qualification of additional analysts and has the 27 analysts identified by Triad as needed to support increased pit production rates,” DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments wrote in a report published May 21. “However, future attrition may exceed Triad’s current hiring plan.”
Triad’s current staffing plan budgets a 10% attrition rate for Criticality Safety Analysts, but the average rate of attribution is more like 16%, according to the Enterprise Assessment office’s report, “Assessment of the Triad National Security, LLC Nuclear Criticality Safety Program
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.” The office conducted its remote review from November 2020 through January and plans a visit to Los Alamos “within a year,” the report said.
If all goes according to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan, the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility will begin casting multiple war-reserve plutonium pits — the spherical cores of nuclear-weapon primary stages — in fiscal year 2024. Upgrading PF-4 and some surrounding infrastructure, an effort called the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project will cost roughly $4 billion, the project estimated in a recently approved critical decision 1 review.
These pits will initially be for the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead: one of two nuclear-armed tips planned for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles slated to replace Minuteman III missiles starting in 2030 or so. In 2019 and 2020, Los Alamos cast development pits for W87-1. Essentially, a practice pit for the lab to study so that they can verify whether designs, equipment and people are ready to make the jump to production later this decade.
These were among the first pits Los Alamos had made in the better part of a decade. PF-4 stopped making pits in 2011 in part due to a widely reported criticality safety violation at the only working pit-production plant in the U.S. Since then, groups outside New Mexico, including the independent federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, have kept a close and critical eye on Los Alamos’ criticality safety program.
The Office of Enterprise Assessments’ recent report is the latest public accounting by one of these groups. In it, the Washington-based DOE office said that while deficiencies remain with Los Alamos’ criticality safety controls, “[n]one of the identified deficiencies pose a credible risk for a criticality accident due to independent, robust controls and additional margin in the evaluations.”
A criticality is when some mass of fissionable atoms is dense enough to sustain an energy-releasing chain reaction.
The NNSA plans two pit factories: the one at Los Alamos and a larger, newer companion facility called the Savannah River Plutonium Production Facility to be built at the Aiken, S.C., Savannah River Site. The two were supposed to combine for 80 pits annually by 2030, including 30 at Los Alamos and 50 at Savannah River. Los Alamos is supposed to make 10 pits a year in 2024 and ramp up to 30 annually by 2026. Their combined lifecycle cost is somewhere above $30 billion over 50 years, NNSA estimates.
In congressional testimony this week, NNSA administrator-designate Jill Hruby said the Savannah River plant might not come online until 2035 or so.
