Personnel at the Pantex Plant will have their dosimetry badges analyzed at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee indefinitely after the Texas assembly facility’s decades-old dosimetry processing equipment finally broke down.
Pantex shifted dosimetry processing to Y-12 on a permanent basis at the end of September, and “there are no current plans to restore on-site processing at Pantex,” a spokesperson for Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) the management and operations contractor for the sites, wrote Wednesday in an email. “Pantex dosimetry software and processing equipment had reached end-of-life and was no longer supported by the manufacturer.”
Pantex stopped processing its personnel’s thermoluminescent dosimeters in June, the spokesperson said. Around that time, the site temporarily shifted analysis of these external badges, which track the wearer’s exposure to ionizing radiation, to the Nevada National Security Site. Nevada was the designated backup site for this work, under an existing approval from the Department of Energy, the spokesperson said.
The independent federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was the first to mention the transfer, which happened nearly a year after end-of-life problems cropped up in earnest at Pantex.
In October 2019, the defense board said, “CNS noted a higher percentage of abnormal dosimetry readouts than typical” when analyzing badges. The degradation was “likely due to aging and inadequate cleaning of the [dosimetry processing] system,” the board said.
CNS and tried to fix the equipment by cleaning it and replacing components, including heating elements, but the fixes didn’t work, the defense board wrote in its latest weekly report on Pantex. According to the board, the equipment was about 40 years old.
Going forward, CNS said that processing the badges at Y-12 should not be much of a burden, at least financially.
The decision to move Pantex’s dosimetry processing to Y-12 is “consistent with the CNS business practice to standardize operations among the two sites where possible,” and there is no “associated outsourcing cost,” the company spokesperson said.
CNS will be the management and operations contractor at Y-12 and Pantex until Sept. 30, 2021. DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration in June said it would not pick up options beyond that on the Bechtel-led team’s contract, and subsequently put the combined site management pact back on the street. A final solicitation for the follow-on contract, worth up to $28 billion over 10 years, could be published before New Year’s.
