Texas’ deep freeze in February damaged “pipes and air-handling units” at the Pantex Plant, including at weapons production facilities, but most of the damage had been repaired by March, a spokesperson for the plant’s prime contractor said Wednesday.
The affected systems “developed leaks and other cold‑related impacts [but] [a]ll operations in the impacted facilities were already paused and materials were already in a safe and stable condition,” the spokesperson for Consolidated Nuclear Security wrote in an email.
Pantex is still tuning up heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC), plumbing, and fire systems at some of the sprawling plant’s “ancillary buildings,” but the damage at the weapons production facilities has been fixed, the spokesperson said.
Pantex is where the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration services and refurbishes all U.S. nuclear warheads and bombs. The facility also stores surplus plutonium pits: the fissile sparkplugs that begin a thermonuclear explosion.
The independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board first reported the freeze damage at the nuclear-weapons-service-center in a pair of weekly reports in which resident inspectors for the independent federal health-and-safety watchdog described Pantex’s recovery from the record-breaking freeze that paralyzed much of the Lone Star state earlier this year.
According to the defense board, the freeze affected 10 nuclear facilities and more than 50 other facilities, including a combination of balance-of-plant and explosive facilities. Balance of plant facilities are those that help distribute energy and utilities. Explosive facilities are for servicing and examining conventional explosives used in nuclear weapons.
The Pantex spokesperson declined to say which particular facilities were damaged by the freeze. While the plant had contemplated the possibility of freeze damage in the nuclear facilities affected two months ago, none of those facilities had ever actually frozen over prior to February’s unprecedented cold weather, the spokesperson said.
“[A]ppropriate mitigating actions had been developed; those actions were successfully implemented during the February extreme cold event to ensure the safety and security of all materials,” the spokesperson said.
