A power outage at the Nevada National Security Site’s Device Assembly Facility (DAF) interrupted some of the site’s nuclear stockpile stewardship operations for about two weeks this month, a spokesperson said.
The outage happened July 1, after a series of mishaps in replacing the DAF’s uninterruptible power source — a backup power supply system that keeps the building electrified in emergencies or other outages, planned or unplanned.
The unplanned outage prompted the site’s Honeywell-led management contractor, Mission Support and Test Services, to temporarily shut down DAF-hosted programs. That meant the facility could not prepare experiments for the Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research (JASPER) program from July 1 through July 16, the site spokesperson wrote in an email last week.
JASPER, also located at the former Nevada Test Site, is a two-stage device that helps simulate some of the effects of a nuclear detonation. The first stage, a permanent fixture of the installation, fires a non-nuclear projectile down a long metal tube. The projectile helps propel a small amount of plutonium into a target sealed within a second stage, which is disposed of as waste after each impact.
The device helps the National Nuclear Security Administration gauge — without resorting to nuclear explosive tests — whether current nuclear weapons are maintaining their specified destructive power as they age.
The outage has not yet delayed any underground subcritical experiments, or any experiments that support those explosive no-yield tests, the Nevada site spokesperson wrote. Subcritical experiments explosively compress plutonium inside a large welded-steel vessel. In addition to the plutonium experiments, nuclear weapons labs periodically test the vessels themselves by detonating only high explosives in them — a dry-run to ensure the containers will not fail during a plutonium test.
The NNSS spokesperson would not comment directly about the outage’s effect, if any, on the half metric ton of weapon-usable plutonium shipped to the Device Assembly Building in 2018 from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
“The electrical system repair does not impact the safety or security posture in DAF,” the spokesperson wrote in response to a question about whether the plutonium remained in the DAF during the outage.
The Nevada National Security Site expects to fully repair the DAF’s electric system by August. Workers powered the facility back up in mid-July.
Editor’s note, 08/12/2019, 08:41 Eastern Time: We edited the story to clarify that JASPER does not propel plutonium down a long metal tube.
