The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has called on its Los Alamos Field Office to create a working group that will solicit proposals for a “state-of-the-art seismic performance analysis” of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Plutonium Facility (PF-4), according to an Aug. 18 letter sent to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). The NNSA’s July 22 memorandum to the LANL field office requests an updated plan “to address the remaining PF-4 seismic issues, considering the costs and benefits of additional design upgrades as well as addressing the schedule for a future safety basis update.” The plutonium processing facility is considered vulnerable to degradation or collapse in the event of large earthquakes.
The memo emphasizes the need for “a working group to develop a request for proposal (RFP) for [NNSA’s Office of Safety, Infrastructure, and Operations] to solicit cost, scope, and schedule to conduct a dynamic, non-linear analysis of selected aspects of PF-4” as part of “a longer-term strategy to provide assurance of the acceptability of the final seismic system performance.” This analysis would follow “four seismic performance analyses accomplished during the last five years,” the memo says, and the results of the RFP solicitation would inform “a specific path forward for additional modelling of PF-4.” Last December, the DNFSB informed Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz that “NNSA’s current analysis does not adequately predict the likelihood of the seismic collapse scenario” and requested a “completed analysis” to identify the need for “structural modifications” at the facility.
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