Staff Reports
NS&D Monitor
12/4/2015
Consolidated Nuclear Security, the government’s managing contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is advancing plans to address the National Nuclear Security Administration’s mandate to reduce the enriched uranium inventory in the plant’s aged 9212 complex. A critical part of that effort apparently will involve stepping up the maintenance program to make the uranium-processing equipment more reliable.
According to a newly released report from Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staff, the Y-12 contractor – in conjunction with the NNSA’s Production Office and Tim Driscoll, the uranium program manager at agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. – has decided that improving maintenance of the uranium-purification equipment at 9212 is the “most prudent first step” in reducing the enriched uranium load and minimizing risks to workers and the general public.
There reportedly is a large backlog of maintenance requests, with approximately 200 work orders pending for the production equipment used to purify uranium metal. Metal is the preferred form for removing the nuclear materials from 9212 and relocating them to safe and secure storage facilities elsewhere at the Oak Ridge installation.
The government wants to end operations at 9212 as soon as possible and, in the meantime, to reduce dangers posed by the complex. The decades-old facility is used to process scraps of bomb-grade uranium – including the nuclear remnants still contained in solutions.
Earlier this year, Steve Erhart, then the manager of the NPO, and Driscoll, the NNSA’s uranium czar, challenged Consolidated Nuclear Security to double Y-12’s production of purified uranium metal to 1,000 kilograms annually. If the contractor can approach or meet that goal, it reportedly will build the quantity of uranium that can be transferred to the plant’s high-security storage site, known as the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility.
CNS has created a Metal Productivity Improvement Team, which held its first meeting in mid-October to make plans for equipment improvements at 9212. According to the DNFSB staff report, the Y-12 team’s main goal for fiscal 2016 is to eliminate the maintenance backlog on equipment used to purify the enriched uranium and make it more manageable for storage or usable in defense program missions.
The report indicated the contractor plans to invoke work outages to focus on equipment maintenance, and that those outages could have a negative impact on production missions at Y-12. The safety board staff memo to DNFSB headquarters said the CNS plan will probably “hinder” the plant’s production capability in the short term – although the more reliable equipment should help boost the uranium-purification work in fiscal 2017 and the years beyond that.
The Y-12 operating contractor has not yet responded to questions about the timetable for achieving the NNSA goal of purifying 1,000 kilograms of uranium annually.
