The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is still hammering the Department of Energy about a nearly decade-old recommendation to stiffen safety requirements at Savannah River Site’s Building 235-F to avoid a plutonium release from the aging structure.
In a Nov. 2 letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Joyce Connery, the board chair, praised DOE for removing “combustibles, ignition sources and some material-at-risk” from the 1950s-vintage facility, but dinged the agency for not updating Building 235-F’s safety basis — a document that categorizes a nuclear facility’s risks and hazards and explains how to mitigate them — to comply with DOE standards.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) also asked for annual briefings on DOE’s progress deactivating and decommissioning the Building 235-F, or the F-Area Materials Storage Facility. The windowless, concrete structure has most recently been used as a plutonium way station, storing material on its way to other parts of the site or the DOE complex.
Previously, 235-F manufactured plutonium-238 fuel for NASA spacecraft. DOE started deactivating the facility in 2020 and planned to finish deactivation in fiscal year 2022, according to the agency’s fiscal 2022 budget request.
Though slated for deactivation, DNFSB, among other things, still recommended that DOE classify parts of 235-F’s fire protection program as specific administrative controls — declare that those parts are needed to prevent some specific accident — and categorize the building’s ventilation and sand filter systems as safety significant.
In a roughly 20-page report appended to the letter, DNFSB fretted about plutonium dispersal either because of fires or a stronger-than-anticipated earthquake at 235-F, especially because some parts of the facility, walls or ceilings, might not be as easy to decontaminate as gloveboxes.
