Longtime UPF Procurement Manager Rich Brown Leaving for UK Project
NS&D Monitor
9/19/2014
Rich Brown, the longtime procurement manager on the Uranium Processing Facility project, is leaving UPF to support a new project in the United Kingdom for Bechtel Systems and Infrastructure. He will be replaced by Bechtel procurement official Mark Swager, UPF Project Director Brian Reilly said in a message to the UPF team this week. For the last nine years, Swager has served as the Acquisition Services manager for the Bechtel-led Pueblo Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant in Colorado.
Reilly said Swager will formally take over the position in mid-October, and he will be on site next week to begin a “structured and well-coordinated” transition with Brown. “I am confident that Mark’s leadership and experience will serve us well as we continue current procurement and construction activities and prepare for full-scale construction,” Reilly said. In his message, Reilly called Brown “an instrumental part of our project team, focused on doing what needs to be done now to prepare vendors for future success on the UPF project.” Reilly did not say what project Brown will be working on, but in June Brown was detailed to Bechtel’s UK offices for a temporary assignment.
Spallation Neutron Source Shutdown Due to Target Failure
The Spallation Neutron Source, one of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s most valued research facilities, has been shut down because tests indicated that the target vessel was on the verge of failure—a problem that has plagued the SNS over the past couple of years. This time, however, the SNS had been on a good roll, both in terms of its power levels and the length of service it had been receiving with the vessels that hold the 20-ton mercury target that’s a key to neutron production.
The exact cause of the target failure has not been determined at this point, but it could be related to a new design for the target vessel that, ironically, was designed to extend its lifetime and make operations more consistent. “As part of our plans for continuous improvement, we installed a target with a modified design that included a new internal mercury flow pattern intended to minimize the internal cavitation damage at higher power operation,” Ron Crone, an acting assistant lab director at ORNL, said.
Restart Possible in Late September
Crone said he didn’t want to speculate on the cause, but he acknowledged the failure may be related either to the design or the manufacturing process of the stainless-steel vessel. “We have begun the target replacement process, and should resume operation for users within two weeks,” Crone said, indicating restart was possible in the last week of September. Researchers who were scheduled to use the facility were notified of the problem and will be rescheduled for experiments as soon as possible, he said.
The Spallation Neutron Source had been restarted in mid-August following a five-week shutdown for its annual summer maintenance. Each of the target vessels costs about a $1 million, so there’s a cost issue as well as a reliability issue for research. Although there have been problems with the target vessels failing prematurely in the past, Crone noted that each of the previous two targets ran for more than six months, “both progressively setting new records for accumulated beam exposure.” During the summer outage at SNS, workers performed a number of maintenance activities.
