Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
4/10/2015
With Savannah River’s HB-Line in a “safety pause” since an incident in January, processing is expected to resume in the early summer after a recovery plan and corrective actions are put in place, Jim Giusti, a spokesman for the DOE Savannah River Operations Office, said this week. The incident occurred in early January when an outage cut off power to the facility. While power was restored the next day, an agitator did not come back online and the issue wasn’t discovered for a month, compromising one of the facility’s nuclear criticality controls. While HB-Line has been in a “safety pause,” SRS managing contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions completed a recovery plan on March 30 that is being evaluated by the DOE Savannah River office, Giusti said.
The plan aims to ensure that HB-Line can be restored “to an operable status,” Guisti said, and also includes actions for implementing a method to ensure proper agitation, revising procedures and safety documentation to incorporate the new method and worker training on the revisions. “Additional corrective actions are being developed to evaluate the Nuclear Criticality Safety Evaluation and Double Contingency Analysis to prevent recurrence,” Giusti said. “Since all corrective actions are not yet developed, we estimate HB-Line operations will resume in early summer.” The only mission currently impacted by the event is the Alternate Feed Stock campaign, which produces plutonium oxide as feed material for the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, currently under construction.
SRNS also last month completed a causal analysis as to “why criticality safety controls were not properly implemented at HB-Line and H-Canyon,” according to a March 6 DNFSB staff report released this month. SRNS also looked to conduct a number of extent of condition reviews of nuclear criticality safety evaluations in HB-Line and H-Canyon to “identify and resolve similar vulnerabilities,” the report states. “Furthermore, SRNS will conduct extent of condition reviews to see if any of the above lessons learned are applicable to their other nuclear facilities,” according to the report. “Only a handful of the corrective actions include a specific action to perform. Most of the corrective actions involve evaluations and extent of condition reviews, the adequacy of which will be highly dependent on the rigor with which they are conducted.”
