UPF PROJECT DIRECTOR CONFIRMS DESIGN SLOW DOWN
NS&D Monitor
2/28/2014
Uranium Processing Facility Federal Project Director John Eschenberg confirmed this week that work is being scaled back in some areas at the project while potential alternatives are being explored. Eschenberg, in a sideline interview following his Feb. 27 talk at the University of Tennessee’s Institute for Nuclear Security, said the intent is to not get too far ahead in some areas that could be subject to change in coming months. The project chief said no design efforts have been suspended at this point, but there are “selective areas” of the design work that will be evaluated and possibly halted in next few weeks. “What we have done is suspended some overtime,” he said. “Some of the guys, disciplines, have been working 10 to 15 percent overtime. So we’ve suspended overtime. Within the next two to three weeks, we will make a value judgment on which elements of the design might it make sense to suspend.”
He said an evaluation will begin Feb. 28, and the plan is to continue moving forward on work that would be included in the project, no matter what the direction it takes. “I wouldn’t want to encourage the turning over of rocks [to look for alternatives], but some portions of this design we’re very, very confident in,” he said. “That won’t change at all.” The focus of everyone is to come up with a project that will allow Y-12 to get out of its aged 9212 uranium complex by 2025 with a cost of $6.5 billion.
Red Team Will Impact Future Plans
A lot of things will be evolving and changing even while the NNSA’s Red Team, headed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thom Mason, is on site and revisiting how Y-12 does its uranium missions and how they might be done in the future. Eschenberg said the plan is for the Red Team to show up March 10 and “be exposed to all things related to uranium processing and manufacturing at Y-12.” They’ll go away to caucus for a week and then return to Y-12, he said. “Until we wrestle with what the overall scope for the project is—which is 9212, the budget—I think it’s going to make sense to adjust what we had planned to do this year,” he said. “Which is we had planned to start the excavation [for the building’s foundation]. We will not start the excavation this year. We will not do the mass fill, the backfill.”
What the UPF team will do is continue site preparations as much as possible, including rerouting Bear Creek Road and other road activities, and work on the plant’s old water lines and electric utilities. Eschenberg said he has begun preliminary talks with the Tennessee Valley Authority about a new electrical substation for the Y-12 site. “Because the one there is quite dated,” he said. Will NNSA foot the costs? “Not wholly,” he said. “We’re initiating talks now. How the deal works out we’ll settle up on later. But these are the kind of activities we are working to initiative this year.”
Project Not Pushing Toward 90 Percent Design
The UPF team is also planning to move forward with a couple of long-lead procurements, including a concrete batch plant, “which is very critical,” he said. Eschenberg said the design completion percentage on UPF was in the “high 70s” when the decision was made in December/January to start looking for alternatives to the plan. At this time, there is no plan to continue pushing that design to the previous target of 90 percent. “That’s imprudent at this time,” he said. “You don’t want to forejudge the outcome of Dr. Mason’s team. But I think we need to think about what are the likely outcomes of this … and focus our resources on that. And that’s my job to make sure we’re spending our resources smartly and we’re making design deliverables that we can use irrespective of what some final configuration might look like. That’s our challenge. So, in two to three weeks, we’ll be at one interval. Dr. Mason’s team will be at another. The Department’s going to need some time to assess what are really our options. And then where do we go from there.”
Y-12 LEADERSHIP CHANGE FOR RADIOLOGICAL CONTROLS
NS&D Monitor
2/28/2014
In the wake of the Y-12 incident earlier this year involving the mishandling of highly enriched uranium material, there has been a change in the leadership of the plant’s leadership of radiological controls. Yvonne Bishop , B&W Y-12’s acting vice president for environment, safety and health, announced internally that David Wirkus has been named acting director of radiological controls. Wirkus came to Oak Ridge from Idaho, where he worked at the DOE facilities for the past 13 years, most recently at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Facility. He previously worked at the Mound and Rocky Flats facilities within the nuclear weapons complex.
According to the internal announcement, Wirkus is replacing Bobby Oliver, who will assume a new role as a program manager in the ES&H organization. Y-12 spokeswoman Ellen Boatner said the change in leadership was not connected to the incident, in which samples of enriched uranium were reportedly left in worker clothing and belatedly recovered at a security portal as they were about to leave the plant en route to a laundry service. “Bobby says he has been contemplating a few career options for a while, and an opportunity was made available to take a different path towards his ultimate goal of retirement,” Boatner said. She said Wirkus is temporarily taking the position while a search for a permanent manager is conducted.
HIGH FLUX ISOTOPE REACTOR BACK IN ACTION
NS&D Monitor
2/28/2014
The High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory returned to action Feb. 25 after a routine refueling and maintenance period, according to ORNL reactor chief Tim Powers. “We performed replacement of some Cold Source Instrumentation, trouble shooting of one of our primary pump motors, as well as routine preventive maintenance, calibrations, and surveillance testing activities,” Powers said via email in describing the activities.
The 452nd operating cycle in the1960s-era reactor is scheduled to last until March 21, which will be followed by a longer maintenance outage, he said. Many millions of dollars have been spent over the past decade to maintain and upgrade the research reactor, which still uses highly enriched uranium fuel to produce radioisotopes and allows research scientists to perform neutron-scattering experiments to explore the innards of materials.
