Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
8/28/2015
Some operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Plutonium Facility have resumed following approval from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Field Office last month, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) site representative report released last week. “Nuclear operations associated with the T Base II machining activity” were restarted, according to the report dated July 24, after criticality safety issues led to the shutdown of some facility operations in 2013. Personnel at the facility that houses LANL’s plutonium pit manufacturing operations "intend on machining a plutonium part before the end of the fiscal year," the report says, noting that "additional machining operations" will depend upon "successful restart of predecessor and downstream activities."
LANL spokesman Kevin Roark told NS&D Monitor by email that the decision to restart PF-4 operations “follows rigorous assessments and intensive processes to ensure that the operations to be restarted can be executed safely and that all safety management programs are in place to provide appropriate support. Three different teams reviewed and walked down the processes, including emergency response exercises.” Roark said LANL “is scheduled to begin machining pit components by the end of August” and “has completed Federal Readiness Assessments for the balance of machining, which supports destructive pit surveillance, and the Isotope Fuels Impact Tester, which supports NASA.”
Activities that have resumed at PF-4 include “plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) manufacturing; high-energy radiography; analytical chemistry and materials characterization; dynamic testing, materials characterization, and sample surveillance; oxide physical characterization; nondestructive assay; and waste operations and shipping/receiving,” according to Roark.
