It will take Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California about a week to fix broken windows on a glove-box at the lab’s Plutonium Facility, once the work starts.
The four windows broke Dec. 19, after a seal connecting the glove-box furnace failed and caused the interior of the system to negatively pressurize, according to a Department of Energy description of the event. No one was hurt, and there was no release of radiation from the glove box into the lab’s Building 332, a Livermore spokesperson said Jan. 11 via email.
Only the glove-box’s interior windows broke, according to DOE. Exterior windows remained intact and the equipment could be used without risk to the operator, the department said. Nevertheless, the glove box was put into maintenance mode after the accident, and it is not clear when it might be available again.
“Glovebox operations are suspended while the leak is being investigated,” the spokesperson said Thursday. “Because the inner glass broke and the outer layers are still intact, confinement has not been jeopardized. Once the investigation is complete it will take about a week’s worth of work to replace the inner glass.”
The spokesperson would not identify the program for which the glove box was needed.
Glove boxes with furnaces can be used to safely shape radioactive materials Among other things, Livermore conducts plutonium metallurgy research in Building 332. The lab, like its affiliate in Los Alamos, N.M., is in charge of verifying that the aging U.S. stockpile of fissile materials is as potent as required by nuclear weapons designers.
Like the older Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Livermore is tasked with ensuring nuclear weapons — and the fissile material that powers them — will still perform as designed, despite the ongoing U.S. moratorium on nuclear explosive tests.
