Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor took its annual summer recess in mid-August, but we kept track of the nuke news during the publishing holiday and have compiled it here for you.
NNSA Helo Sweeps Charlotte Ahead of GOP Convention
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) dispatched a radiation-sniffing helicopter to the skies of Charlotte, N.C., ahead of the 2020 Republican National Convention held there this week.
A twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter, rigged with passive radiation-sensing instruments, was to “conduct low-altitude helicopter flights over downtown Charlotte and areas in and around Yorkmount on August 20 and 21,” the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency said in a press release.
The helicopter, operated from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland by the NNSA Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), swept a grid some 150 feet above ground level, at about 80 mph. The agency routinely measures background radiation ahead of large public gatherings to create a base level against which the source of a radiological dispersal device — a dirty bomb — would pop out, in later scans.
The DOE branch usually lets residents know ahead of such operations, so nobody is alarmed by low-flying aircraft.
More than 300 Republican delegates, or 13% of the total party delegates, traveledto Charlotte to renominate President Donald Trump to oppose Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election. The convention, which like last week’s Democratic National Convention was downgraded to a mostly virtual event from the usual mass-gathering of pomp and celebration, took place Aug. 24-27.
Unlike Republicans, Democrats sent no delegates at all to their convention in Milwaukee last week. All the delegates to the Democratic National Convention voted remotely on Aug. 18 to nominate Biden to oppose Trump.
The NNSA did not sweep Milwaukee for radiation ahead of the Democratic National Convention, owing to the decline in attendance.
“[D]ue to the severe reduction in planned events, the U.S. Secret Service released NEST from all DNC-related public safety tasking, including the planned flights over Milwaukee.” an NNSA spokesperson wrote Aug. 19 in an email.
Neither Biden nor his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), attended their party’s convention, which until a few months ago was expected to draw 50,000 people to Milwaukee. Similarly, Trump accepted his party’s nomination in a speech from the White House.
Like many planned mass gatherings this year, the conventions went virtual, or nearly so, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 180,000 people in the U.S., and cratered the economy.
Air Force General Doesn’t Rule Out GBSD Hypersonic Variant
Nobody is planning to put a hypersonic glide vehicle on the next U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile, but that doesn’t mean it could never happen, according to careful statements Aug. 19 by the Air Force general who advises the service’s leadership about nuclear weapons.
The Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), silo-based missiles slated to replace the Minuteman III fleet around 2030, has an “open architecture” that would let the Air Force “roll different technologies … into GBSD,” Lt. Gen Richard Clark, deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said in a webcast question-and-answer session with reporters. The Mitchell Institute hosted the event.
Hypersonic glide vehicles would allow for extremely high-speed delivery of payloads at lower altitudes and along different flight paths than those achievable by current ballistic and cruise missiles. Militaries globally covet the technology as a means of evading any deployed air defense.
Clark said the GBSD isn’t required to have any hypersonic capability before being deployed, and declined to say whether the weapon eventually should have such a capability. In March, the Congressional Research Service said, without citing a source, that the United States was not developing nuclear options for such hypersonic glide vehicles. However, Clark left the possibility on the table, for those listening.
Lockheed Martin, which has taken a forward role in U.S. defense-hypersonics development, is part of the Northrop Grumman-led team expected to win a roughly $20 billion Air Force contract this month to build the GBSD.
The Air Force plans to buy more than 650 of the new missiles, including spares and test weapons, and will use them to replace the 400-strong Minuteman III fleet on a one-for-one basis. The missiles could initially use W87-0 warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). These warheads now tip some Minuteman III missiles and would need flight tests aboard the GBSD — using dummy warheads — to be certified for the next-generation missiles.
Eventually, the Air Force will mix in the NNSA’s planned W87-1 warhead into the GBSD fleet. U.S. nuclear forces always deploy at least two versions of a warhead, in case there is an unforeseen, design-specific problem with one of them.
On Aug. 6, the Senate confirmed Clark as superintendent of the United States Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colo. He is slated to take up his new assignment later this year.
LANL Fingers “New Type of Glove” in June Rad Leak
The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico blamed a new type of glove-box glove for a June 8 incident that exposed at least one person, and likely more, to radioactive contamination from plutonium-238, the independent federal Defense Nuclear Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) reported.
Alarms sounded in the Department of Energy lab’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4) after an Actinide Material Processing and Power, Heat Source Technologies (AMPP) employee, who was packaging some plutonium-238 oxide in a glove box, withdrew his hand from a glove in the device. That employee had enough internal contamination that he opted to receive chelation treatment, which can sometimes remove heavy metal such as plutonium from the body.
Los Alamos quickly identified a breach in this glove’s thumb as the source of the leak. In a July 17 report, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said the breached glove was “a new type of glove with a different thickness and insufficient spare parts.”
“[T]he Laboratory is monitoring these gloves considering the different design,” a Los Alamos spokesperson wrote in an Aug. 12 email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
In an initial report about the June 8 incident, Los Alamos said the glove box involved in the release was equipped on some ports with gloves provided by Central Research Laboratories, of Red Wing, Minn., which “have a different tactile feel and provide more dexterity” than other types. This report did not mention any other glove-box vendor by name.
Safety lapses by lab labor and management also contributed to the release, according to the DNFSB report. The board said PF-4 workers on June 8 practiced “less than adequate implementation of glove inspections prior to hand removal,” and that managers failed “to ensure compliance with existing requirements for contamination monitoring.”
The lab previously said it was “likely” that some of the 14 other Los Alamos employees in proximity to the release had some level of internal contamination. Some of the individuals work on the AMPP program, while others do not, the lab spokesperson said.
Bioassays on these individuals “are ongoing,” the spokesperson said. “The Laboratory is currently awaiting test results for all 15 Laboratory employees.”
The lab released the previously contaminated room for occupation in mid-July, and the room “has entered a maintenance phase,” the spokesperson said. Consistent with standard practices, none of the 15 people in proximity to the release will be allowed to resume work involving radiological operations “until there is data to sufficiently bound doses [they received] or dose assessments are completed,” said the spokesperson.
The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which owns Los Alamos, uses plutonium-238 in nuclear-weapons research. The fissile material can also be a heat and power source for spacecraft.
NNSA Manager Selected to Lead Field Ops for DOE Cleanup Office
The Energy Department Office of Environmental Management announced last week that Nicole Nelson-Jean, a familiar face in the weapons complex, will become head of field operations at the end of the month.
A 28-year Energy Department employee and member of the Senior Executive Service, Nelson-Jean now manages the Savannah River Site field office in South Carolina for DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. She has held the post for the past three years.
At Savannah River, Nelson-Jean led NNSA efforts to develop a production capability for plutonium nuclear-warhead cores by renovating the canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, the DOE nuclear cleanup office said Aug. 11 in a statement.
Before coming to South Carolina, Nelson-Jean was NNSA manager at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California from October 2014 through September 2017. She served as acting manager at Livermore for 10 months before that.
In late 2013 and early 2014, Nelson-Jean was a senior adviser at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Previously, she worked as nuclear attaché, representing DOE for the U.S. Mission to the International Organizations in Vienna, Austria. She has also served as energy attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, Japan.
As the Environmental Management associate principal deputy assistant secretary for field operations (EM-3) Nelson-Jean will oversee nuclear operations; construction; environmental restoration and other activities at 16 Manhattan Project and Cold War cleanup sites.
Thomas Mooney, the DOE Environmental Management office chief of staff, has been acting as head of field operations since shortly after Jeff Griffin left the agency in March to take a post with the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories in Chalk River, Ontario. Mooney will soon move to a newly created job of chief operations officer, assisting Nelson-Jean, according to DOE. Mooney will continue to serve as chief of staff until a replacement is named for that position.
Mooney became EM chief of staff in January after serving as chief of staff for the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief Management Officer since October 2017. He has also worked in the White House and for a Virginia-based consulting firm.
When Nelson-Jean relocates to Washington, D.C., Jeffrey Allison, NNSA’s deputy manager at Savannah River, will serve as acting manager until a permanent replacement is selected, an NNSA spokesperson told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Factors Behind Improper Waste Shipments From Y-12 Not Present Elsewhere, DOE Says
If any of the factors that led to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee shipping mislabeled radioactive waste to Nevada are present elsewhere in the Department of Energy complex, the agency’s Office of Enterprise Assessments did not find them in a year of looking, according to a recent report.
The complex-wide evaluation“did not find any conditions similar to those that led to the non-compliant waste shipment from Y-12 in July 2019,” reads the office’s final report. The Energy Department published the report online this month, but the document is dated July 2020.
About a year ago, then-Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette ordered the office to produce the report after the agency acknowledged that Y-12 had for six years shipped improperly labeled radioactive waste to a disposal facility at the Nevada National Security Site.
Y-12 is the defense-uranium processing hub where the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) makes the uranium-powered secondary stages of nuclear weapons. Site personnel discovered and self-reported the inappropriate shipments in July 2019. Around that time, DOE said the Tennessee operation sent nine shipments, with a total of 32 containers of radioactive waste, labeling the weapon-related material as low-level waste when it should have been labeled as mixed low-level waste.
Y-12 paused waste shipments to Nevada after admitting its mistakes last year, and those shipments are still on hold, pending “an independent assessment of the corrective actions that have been implemented in the last year,” a Y-12 spokesperson said Aug. 10. The spokesperson provided no timeline, but said “shipments will resume once the independent assessment is completed and [the Nevada National Security Site] signs off on Y-12’s waste certification program.”
In April, in a separate report that focused only on Y-12, the Enterprise Assessments office said the site’s improper shipments included a “prohibited item” in a classified waste delivery. The report said shipments went out the door with the wrong label because nobody at Y-12 wrote strict rules for disposal of weapon-related material, and that some people working in the facility’s waste management program felt “uneasiness” about management of that material.
Last year, in acknowledging the rule-breaking shipment, a DOE spokesperson characterized the prohibited item as an assembly with “two small energetics (just over two tenths of a gram) each connected to separate pressurized vessels, inside a one-half inch steel container. If the pressurized vessels were to release their pressure the pressure inside the assembly would be no greater than 60 pounds of pressure per square inch (psi), about the same amount of pressure as a bicycle tire.”
In its August final report on complex-wide waste packing and shipping, the Enterprise Assessments office recommended, among other things, that DOE program offices set up a working group to prepare lessons learned from the Y-12 incident, with the aim of ensuring sufficient federal oversight of contractors to prevent a repeat.
