Y-12’s Continues to Experience Conduct of Operations Issues
NS&D Monitor
6/19/2015
Conduct of operations has been a repeated and ongoing concern at the Y-12 National Security Complex and it appears that situation improved in recent months, based on numerous reports by staff of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board assigned to the Oak Ridge plant. According to a newly released report, dated the week of May 8, the Y-12 contractor – Bechtel-led Consolidated Nuclear Security – acknowledged it had not made hoped-for progress in that area in what the DNFSB staffers said was an “honest and self-critical” assessment that CNS submitted to the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The report said that CNS senior officials attributed the “lack of progress” in achieving operational excellence to the “quantity and significance of change employees experienced after contract transition.” CNS assumed management of Y-12 and its sister plant, Pantex, on July 1, 2014, under a newly combined management contract. The DNFSB staff said the CNS assessment provided to the National Nuclear Security Administration was the senior staff’s view of how well the contractor is performing against a list of needed culture changes. The report noted that the contractor believed it was improving in some performance areas, but “remains inconsistent.”
The safety board’s site representatives at Y-12 said they agreed with the contractor’s assessment “regarding the lack of desired progress in achieving operational excellence.” They said they had met with contractor officials to discuss the significance of recent incidents and were waiting on a performance improvement plan to see how the contractor intends to integrate the efforts into near-term improvements.
CNS declined to release a copy of the self-assessment provided to NNSA, but did provide a copy of a message to employees from Morgan Smith, the contractor’s chief operating officer. “. . . We clearly recognize that there has been some impact from distractions created by the magnitude of changes created during the transformation to CNS,” Smith said toward the end of the lengthy message. “Chief among those distractions has been changes to the benefits plans. We have already made some changes to alleviate several significant problem areas as has been previously communicated . . . Excellence is a never-ending journey. It is not easily achieved day-in and day-out in a complex business but is our unrelenting goal.”
In the same DNFSB report that address the contractor’s self-assessment, it was revealed that Y-12 had suffered yet-another incident that seemed to reflect poorly on the ability to follow the tight procedures required at a nuclear weapons facility. According the report, an operator working on the Oxide Conversion Facility in 9212 – the plant’s hub for processing weapons-grade uranium –“made several errors.” Those include performing a procedure that had already been performed. “The operator was not at work on the day the procedure was initiated and, the next day, the operator inadvertently started a section of the procedure that had previously been performed,” the report stated. “The operator immediately identified the error, paused the operation, and notified the Shift Manager.”
The shift manager reportedly discussed the situation with the supervisor, reviewed the procedure and then told the operator to proceed “with the correct section of the procedure.” But the situation didn’t end there. “The operator resumed the operation and missed a step that required the (shift manager) to transition the status of the hydrofluorination bed (HFB) to operation mode,” the staff report to DNFSB headquarters stated. “The SM caught the error when he called the operator to ask why the request to place the HFB in operation mode had not been made. The operation was again paused to allow the SM to confer with several other managers and the Shift Technical Advisor prior to directing work to resume again.”
The shift manager later noted that he should have formally suspended the uranium operation after the operator’s first error. The Oxide Conversion Facility is a part of the plant’s 9212 uranium-processing hub. The Defense Board report said that at a later fact-finding session, supervisors at the Y-12 production unit acknowledged that they relied on the “pre-job briefing” to inform operators what work they would be performing on a particular day. “But they do not formally document the stopping point on the procedure or in a logbook,” the safety board site reps stated.
ORNL’s HFIR Experiences Issues
NS&D Monitor
6/19/2015
The High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has apparently recovered from an unplanned shutdown last weekend and returned to normal operations. The timing is important because the HFIR is one of ORNL’s two major neutron sources – the other being the accelerator-based Spallation Neutron Source – that are not only important for ongoing scientific experiments but also as training vehicles for the upcoming National School on Neutron and X-Ray Scattering. The two-week school for graduate students began this week at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and will transition to Oak Ridge next week for the conclusion of classes.
Workers at ORNL manually shut down the 85-megawatt research reactor on Saturday, June 13, after the reactor’s control system generated a signal for an automatic reduction in power. A faulty part was identified and replaced by workers, and the 85-megawatt research reactor reportedly returned to full power by the afternoon of June 15.
Paul Langan, ORNL’s associate lab director for neutron sciences, said the reactor was placed in a “safe shutdown condition” around noon on June 13, using normal operating procedures. “Discussions with the operating crew indicated that the plant was in a stable condition and plant parameters were not changing prior to the event,” Langan said in a written statement. “Investigation into the cause identified an internal fault in a recorder in the auxiliary control room as the most likely cause. The recorder was replaced with a calibrated spare, and the post-maintenance testing was completed satisfactorily.”
The normal operating cycle was resumed after Johnny Moore, the Department of Energy’s site manager at ORNL, gave his approval, Langan said. The ORNL official said 27 experiments were interrupted by the shutdown. Those involved 38 researchers, and Langan said they would be given priority beam time at the reactor to complete their work.
