NS&D Monitor took a break last week for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, but out affiliate publication, Weapons Complex Morning Briefing did not. Here’s a recap of some of the nuclear security enterprise news covered last week.
DOE Investigating CNS For ‘Criticality Safety Weaknesses’
The Department of Energy’s Enterprise Assessments (EA) office will investigate Consolidated Nuclear Security for “nuclear criticality control weaknesses” at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s main uranium-handling site in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
The internal DOE oversight body informed Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) of the impending investigation on Nov. 13, according to a notice posted on the agency’s website. The agency is stepping in to check out nuclear criticality control weaknesses identified between May 2017 and May 2018 at the Y-12 National Security Complex, according to a letter from Kevin Dressman, acting director of the EA Office of Enforcement, to Morgan Smith, CNS president and CEO.
The company self-reported concerns at Y-12 to the agency, Dressman wrote in his letter. It does not address details of the weaknesses. Nuclear criticality is a sustained fission reaction.
The investigation will encompass an on-site visit and interviews with contractor employees, according to Dressman.
“Since the self-discovery and reporting of legacy issues with Y-12’s nuclear criticality controls, affected operations at Y-12 were temporarily paused and actions were taken to review and improve procedures,” a CNS spokesperson wrote in an email. “Y-12 will support the investigation, which is planned for January 2019.”
Consolidated Nuclear Security is led by Bechtel National, with industry partners Leidos, Northrop Grumman, and SOC and subcontractor with Booz Allen Hamilton. The company manages both Y-12 and the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, under a single contract awarded in 2014 by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Pantex Plant Lacks Plans to Deal With Potentially Deadly Hazards, DNFSB Says
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 this month.
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 Nov. 16. 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.
In one of the documents published Nov. 16, 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.
Stopgap LANL Director Wallace Remains at Lab in Emeritus Role
Terry Wallace, who was briefly director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the waning days of Los Alamos National Security’s management contract, is still with the lab in an emeritus role, a Los Alamos spokesperson said.
Wallace “continues to serve the Laboratory as Director Emeritus in the Office of National Security and International Studies,” a lab spokesperson wrote in an email Nov. 16. Wallace is still based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the spokesperson said.
Wallace replaced longtime laboratory director Charles McMillan on Jan. 1. Wallace served about nine months as director until Triad National Security took over management of the nation’s oldest national laboratory on Nov. 1.
When he was still working for McMillan, Wallace was Los Alamos National Laboratory’s principal associate director for global security: a position he had held since 2011. In that role, Wallace led laboratory programs “with a focus on applying scientific and engineering capabilities to address national and global security threats, in particular, nuclear threats,” according to his official bio. He has worked at LANL since 2003.
DOE in 2014 elected not to extended Los Alamos National Security’s roughly $2-billion-a-year contract after a nuclear waste accident that caused a radiation leak at the agency’s underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The company was a partnership led by the University of California and Bechtel National, with industry teammates AECOM and BWX Technologies.
Triad, led by nonprofits Battelle Memorial Institute, longtime Los Alamos manager the University of California, and Texas A&M University, took over at Los Alamos on Nov. 1, under a National Nuclear Security Administration management contract worth about $20 billion over 10 years, including five one-year options. Fluor and Huntington Ingalls Industries are integrated subcontractors on the pact.
MOX Services Complains to Court After NNSA Makes Allegedly Disallowed Contract Claim
The prime contractor of a canceled plutonium-disposal plant in South Carolina cried foul in a long-running lawsuit against its client, the National Nuclear Security Administration, after the government allegedly broke a promise not to dispute certain costs claimed under the nearly 20-year-old contract.
MOX Services said the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) disputed more than $500,000 in claimed costs related to electrical work performed at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2015, according to a motion for a status conference the contractor filed Nov. 14 with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
Judge Thomas Wheeler granted that motion, which the NNSA did not oppose, and scheduled a telephonic status update for Tuesday. MOX Services alleged the agency violated a tolling agreement signed Oct. 10, under which the government would be allowed to pursue claims against the contractor arising from costs billed in 2011 and beyond, so long as the government waited to do so until after the lawsuit concludes.
The suit is slated to go to trial in April 2019.
MOX Services sued the NNSA in 2016, alleging the agency was responsible for a series of cost overruns and schedule misses at the MFFF. The agency blamed the contractor at least in part for those failures, which the government eventually cited in its Oct. 10 decision to cancel of the nonproliferation plant. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency has spent some $5 billion on MFFF so far. MOX Services seeks more than $200 billion in damages and withheld fees.
So far, the lawsuit has mostly broken MOX Services’ way. Wheeler has directed some sharp language at the NNSA from the bench, lambasting the agency for “baseless retaliation” against the contractor as part of a decision this spring that required the agency to return some $20 million in withheld fees to MOX Services.
The NNSA plans to turn MFFF into a factory capable of annually producing 50 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits by 2030. The plant was designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under a reciprocal arms-control pact with Russia that was signed in 2000.
MOX Services this month said it would lay off about 600 plant employees by early January.
DOE General Counsel Nominee Still Awaiting Vote
President Donald Trump’s nominee to become Energy Department general counsel, William Cooper, is still waiting on a vote by the full Senate, although he has apparently already started working at the federal agency in another role.
Cooper, a former staff director for the House Natural Resources mineral resources subcommittee, is now a senior adviser to the Energy Department, according to his LinkedIn profile. The online biography did not offer any details on what the advisory role entails. He became a DOE adviser only this month.
Cooper had previously served as senior counsel and director of the Washington, D.C., office of the McConnell Valdés law firm for 18 months. Prior to being staff director for the House subcommittee, Cooper headed a trade group for the liquefied natural gas industry for several years.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee advanced Cooper’s nomination on a voice vote on Aug. 23. His nomination was placed on the Senate executive calendar but no Senate floor was scheduled at deadline.
One source expects Cooper and other DOE nominees to be approved during the lame duck session of Congress before new lawmakers are sworn in during January.
As of this spring, Theodore (Ted) Garrish, who had been confirmed in April as assistant secretary for international affairs, was also serving as acting general counsel. It was unclear at deadline if he is still serving in that capacity.
The website for the DOE’s general counsel office currently lists only two people, Deputy General Counsel Eric Fygi and John Lucas, the deputy general counsel for transactions, technology, and contractor resources. The deputy post for litigation, regulation, and enforcement is currently vacant.
