Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
2/5/2016

The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has made significant improvements in the process of fully resuming fissile material operations paused in 2013 at its Plutonium Facility (PF-4) at Technical Area 55 (TA-55), the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) found in a review released on Jan 29.

The report found that LANL managing contractor Los Alamos National Security (LANS) has “adequately implemented” measures to ensure that resumed operations at the plutonium sustainment pit manufacturing and surveillance facility are conducted safely. “LANS has significantly improved the level of detail and execution of procedures, criticality safety postings, fissile material labeling, and worker training and qualification,” it said.

PF-4 has been the subject of safety concerns for years, as approximately 250 performance feedback and improvement tracking system actions have identified issues in the facility’s criticality safety program implementation since 2006, the report said. The main issue, it said, was that “many of the assumptions supporting the criticality safety fissile material limits and other stated requirements were not documented.” The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) previously identified a sharp increase in criticality safety infractions in the months leading up to the work pause, such as a case in which DNFSB staff found nuclear materials stored in a lab workstation. The nuclear criticality safety program is intended to prevent inadvertent nuclear criticalities, or unintended, self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reactions.

After fissile material operations at PF-4 were paused in June 2013 due to weaknesses in criticality safety and conduct-of-operations programs, EA was tasked with reviewing the progress of corrective actions and restart of operations. Causal analyses after the work pause identified weaknesses in management commitment to criticality safety, ineffective processes in identifying problems, and staffing and knowledge losses that threatened the viability of the criticality safety program.

In particular, these reviews found “a pervasive culture within LANL of reactive management,” and issues for which many managers “deny that any real threat to criticality safety exists.” Moreover, nuclear criticality safety staff attrition was attributed to “a distrustful relationship between staff and management following the realignment of the criticality safety group lower down in the organizational structure,” the report said. LANS developed an improvement plan in December 2013 to address these deficiencies.

The latest EA review noted LANS has re-established a criticality safety division to address corrective actions, as well as a TA-55 criticality safety board to manage program implementation. “The TA-55 management team demonstrated that managers recognize the significance of the safety issues that led to the safety pause and are leading extensive changes in processes and behaviors to achieve safe resumption of all operations,” the report said.

However, the review found that during its corrective action development process, LANS did not “determine the compliance status of all elements of its criticality safety program” or fully identify the compensatory measures needed for compliance until the root causes could be corrected. The report identified as opportunities for improvement revisions of corrective action implementation processes and discussions with TA-55 personnel about the root causes of the work pause.