It will take about a month longer than previously thought for personnel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to certify that a key component of the site’s planned plutonium pit factory can safely accept the higher volumes fissile material required to support the pit mission.
The Radiological Laboratory/Utility/Office Building (RLUOB) will be recategorized as a hazard category 3 nuclear facility in April 2022 instead of March 2022, the independent federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board wrote in a recent report.
RLUOB will be rechristened as the PF-400 facility and support analytical chemistry and materials categorization for the planned Los Alamos mission to produce multiple war-ready plutonium pits – nuclear-weapon triggers – beginning in fiscal year 2024. The lab plans to ramp up to 30 pits a year in 2026 as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan to produce 80 pits annually by 2030.
Los Alamos may even be taxed to produce more than 30 pits annually now that the NNSA has acknowledged its second planned pit factory, at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., may arrive five years later than expected, and at more than double the cost of preliminary estimates.
RLUOB is classified now as a radiological facility and can legally accept just under 40 grams of plutonium at once. As a hazard category 3 facility, it could accept up to 10 times as much plutonium by weight. The current categorization should be enough to begin preliminary pit-support activities, the NNSA wrote in its fiscal year 2022 budget request, which the agency released late last month just before the Memorial Day holiday.
Editor’s note, 06/07/2021, 2:57 p.m. Eastern time: the story was updated with the correct plutonium possession limits for a radiological facility.
