March 17, 2014

DNFSB PRESSES NNSA FOR DETAILS ON PLUTONIUM FACILITY ANALYSIS

By ExchangeMonitor

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has pressed the National Nuclear Security Administration to take a new look at the modeling techniques used to gauge the risk of a seismic-generated collapse at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility, and now the Board is pushing the NNSA for information on the status of its “alternate” analysis. In a July 17 letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz released on Friday, DNFSB Chairman Peter Winokur requested a briefing about the ongoing analysis in 45 days. The NNSA has poured millions into upgrading the facility against a massive earthquake, which is believed to potentially occur every 2,000 yeas in Northern New Mexico, and NNSA’s own calculations have lowered the total effective dose equivalent to 23 rem, just under the 25 rem DOE guideline.

That led former Energy Secretary Steven Chu to suggest that the facility met guidelines for protecting the public from an exposure, but the Board said last year that the lab was not conservative enough in its calculations and that its own analysis revealed the potential exposure to be more than four times that level. “The Board does not agree with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) conclusion that these modeling results demonstrate compliance with DOE standards for confinement integrity following a design basis earthquake,” Winokur wrote. “The Board communicated its concerns with this analysis in the summer of 2012 and suggested the need to perform a more representative ‘alternate’ analysis to account for the very large vertical excitations that the structure would be subjected to during the design basis earthquake. The Board is encouraged that DOE is performing the ‘alternate’ analysis to improve the safety posture of the facility and increase the margin between loss of confinement and the onset of collapse.”

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