The Department of Energy and contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security lacked plans to deal with a small number of plausible hazards that could lead, among other things, to an inadvertent nuclear detonation at the nation’s prime nuclear-weapon assembly and disassembly site, according to a draft report the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) report made public recently.
The DNFSB published these findings after board-led investigations conducted at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, between November 2017 and late July 2018, according to documents made public Friday. The board voted to publish the documents in mid-September; it took the agency about two months to actually release them.
From its investigations, the independent federal nuclear-health-and-safety agency called out inadequate hazard planning involving five nuclear weapons serviced at Pantex: the B61 gravity bomb; the W76 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead; the W78 intercontinental ballistic-missile warhead; the W87 intercontinental ballistic-missile warhead; and the W88 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead.
Neither DOE nor its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration replied to requests for comment by deadline Tuesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
In one of the documents published last week, the DNFSB acknowledged that Pantex’s safety documentation does “identify adequate controls for the vast majority of credible hazard scenarios.” However, the report warned, “[t]he Board’s staff team identified credible hazard scenarios that lack documented evidence that Pantex has identified and implemented credited safety controls to prevent high order consequences, i.e., inadvertent nuclear detonation (IND) and/or high explosive violent reaction (HEVR).”
Some of the hazard scenarios involved dropping or scraping weapons, or technicians falling down near weapons, according to the DNFSB documents.
In some cases, Pantex management prime Consolidated Nuclear Security did contemplate the hazards the DNFSB called out, but deemed those scenarios so unlikely that the contractor detailed no means of preventing them in the site’s documented safety analysis — a comprehensive, DOE-mandated guide that details the hazards associated with operating and cleaning up defense nuclear sites.
