September 09, 2014

Still No Timeline for Full Restart of LANL Pu Operations

By ExchangeMonitor

It doesn’t appear that Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility will be fully operational any time soon. Work at the facility was shut down in June of 2013, with only partial operations having resumed, and National Nuclear Security Administration Acting Associate Administrator for Infrastructure and Operations Jim McConnell said the facility is being restarted with an eye on sustaining long-term operations at the facility. "The plutonium facilities at LANL are being upgraded to support the long-term plutonium mission,” McConnell said in a Sept. 5 letter to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. “Criticality safety and conduct of operations at PF-4 are also being upgraded to ensure safe, sustained, long-term nuclear operations. Our oversight activities, readiness preparations, and review processes for all the PF-4 resumption activities will be consistent with this objective.” McConnell said NNSA and the lab are developing the scope and schedule for the readiness assessments. Los Alamos did not respond to a request for additional details.

McConnell said lengthy readiness reviews will be conducted on operations that haven’t yet been restarted. That will include contractor readiness reviews for welding, assembly, inspection, and part and low energy radiography. Federal readiness assessments will be conducted on pyrochemistry, aqueous chloride, aqueous nitrate, cementation, casting, milling and blending, welding, isotope fuel impact tester, hot isotopic press, electrolytic decontamination of uranium, machining, and furnace operations.

Operations that have already restarted include work involving Plutonium-238, high energy radiography, full-scale test facility, actinide chemistry and material characterization, dynamic testing, repackaging, consolidation and discard, 3013 packaging, materials identification and surveillance, oxide characterization, non-destructive assay, waste/shipping/receiving, material storage and staging, drop boxes, and material transfer carts. “We will continue to focus on improvement in the operations that have already been resumed through the Laboratory Director’s process,” McConnell said. “Senior LANL managers, in conjunction with federal oversight, will be present to monitor and support continuous improvement in resumed operations to achieve a high standard of safety through robust conduct of operations practices including implementing concise and direct criticality safety requirements.”

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