Los Alamos National Laboratory management contractor Triad National Security must quickly change the issues-management practices it inherited from its predecessor to prevent problems with plutonium facilities from spiraling out of control and derailing planned production of nuclear-weapon cores starting in 2026, the Energy Department said in a report Monday.
The report comes from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Safety and Environmental Assessments, which is part of the agency’s Office of Enterprise Assessments.
The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is on the hook to by 2030 annually produce no fewer than 80 fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits. The agency plans to make 30 of those at Los Alamos using the upgraded Plutonium Facility.
But there are “significant weaknesses in the LANS IM [issues-management] process and institutional behaviors that have allowed identified problems to go uncorrected, problem recurrences to be routinely accepted, and corrective actions to often be delayed for years,” according to the report.
The report, published online late Monday, cited the four-year pause in plutonium operations at Los Alamos starting in 2013 under previous lab prime Los Alamos National Security (LANS): a group led by the University of California and Bechtel with BWX Technologies and AECOM.
“Having adopted the LANS IM process with only minor changes, Triad is now responsible for correcting the weaknesses in that process and in the associated institutional behaviors identified in this report,” the Enterprise Assessments office wrote. “Triad’s development and implementation of its strategic initiatives to improve IM and to ‘achieve culture change with an emphasis on organizational learning’ will be key to safely supporting increased production rates of plutonium pits through 2030.”
In its solicitation for a management contractor, the NNSA required the winning bidder to change the “culture” at the lab, which the agency blamed for a series of high-profile mistakes with defense materials and nuclear waste.
Triad is led by the Battelle Memorial Institute, the University of California, and Texas A&M University, with integrated industry subcontractors Fluor and Huntington Ingalls Industries.
