A memo from the Sandia National Laboratories posted to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) website offers more, if not new, details about the Energy Department’s dismissal of a consulting firm’s finding that plutonium stored at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) could go critical in the distant future.
The two-page, number-laden memo, dated Feb. 12 and signed by Paul Shoemaker, senior manager for the Carlsbad Programs Group at Sandia National Laboratories, repeated in detail what DOE officials from Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on down have summarized in Washington budget hearings for a month: that diluted plutonium stored at WIPP would not go critical, even after the facility is long closed and its salt walls compresses the waste stored there.
“While surplus, weapons grade Pu disposal would increase the amount of Pu-239 (and possibly other Pu isotopes) in WIPP several fold, and increase the average density of Pu-239, criticality of downblended and packaged Pu-239 cannot result,” the memo reads. “The salt formation will squeeze the disposal rooms and consolidate the waste, but this process cannot separate [plutonium] from the diluting materials to form an undiluted critical mass.”
The report the memo criticizes was prepared by High Bridge Associates for the Board of Governors of CB&I AREVA MOX Services, the consortium that is building the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility at DOE’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. The Obama administration in its fiscal 2017 budget request proposed canceling the project in favor of a dilute and dispose method that it says would more cheaply, safely, and quickly deal with surplus U.S. plutonium.
Charles Hess, High Bridge vice president and chief nuclear officer, on March 18 bristled at NNSA’s assessment, telling Weapons Complex Monitor plutonium does not need to be separated from its inhibitor materials to cause an incident. Criticality can result from increasing the density by adding more plutonium or water, he said. “The geologic action of the WIPP salt dome will accomplish both,” Hess added.
The MOX facility is designed to turn 34 metric tons of excess weapon-usable plutonium into fuel suitable for commercial reactors, under a nuclear arms-reduction pact finalized with Russia in 2010.
According to the memo from Shoemaker, Sandia — which is managed for DOE by Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sandia Corp. — based its assessment on a summary of the High Bridge report published Jan. 29, rather than a more expansive copy of the same report the consulting shop published March 2.
Wastren Advantage Inc. said Thursday it is officially and fully on the job at the Energy Department’s 222-S Laboratory at the Hanford Site in Washington state, where the company now holds the potentially five-year, $44.6 million contract to manage analytic testing of samples of radioactive and chemical waste.
The press release cleared the wire only this week, although the actual transition of work to the Piketon, Ohio-based company began in September and was complete in late November, according to the release.
The contract’s base period, worth about $17 million, runs until Sept. 20, 2017. Wastren beat out three other bidders to win the work last year.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a Tuesday hearing of the House science committee unequivocally denied he ever transmitted sensitive or classified information over a nongovernment email account.
The question was raised late in a two-hour budget hearing by Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), who briefly held the gavel for Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas).
“Have you ever transmitted classified data over your personal account?” Palmer asked.
“Never,” Moniz replied.
Palmer raised the question, he said, because of news reports that said officials at DOE and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission used “personal” email addresses for official government business.
Moniz said he has two official email DOE accounts: one that is available to the public and vetted by an executive secretary, and one that is not available to the public, and which he uses to correspond directly and more privately with people about official business. The second address, Moniz said, is sometimes called a “personal” email.
“On the occasions where if I get an email to my [non-government] account that’s relevant to DOE business, I copy it to the government accounts, so there’s a record of everything,” Moniz told Palmer. “We can’t avoid receiving an email, but then the direction is that everything has to be copied to the government account.”
Carnegie Mellon University will offer graduate-level robotics training focused on nuclear waste-handling and disposal jobs, under a new five-year cooperative agreement with the Energy Department worth up to $3 million.
The money will provide a fellowship-like training program for up to 20 doctorate- and masters-level robotics students at the Pittsburgh university’s Robotics Institute, plus money for the institute itself, Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall said at the university.
In partnership with Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., the trainee program will focus on robotic techniques for DOE cleanup needs, including: environmental remediation; radioactive waste retrieval, treatment, processing, storage, transportation, and disposal; stewardship of spent nuclear fuel and special nuclear materials; nuclear facility and infrastructure operations, maintenance and sustainment; facility/infrastructure deactivation and decommissioning; worker safety; industrial and nuclear facility safety; and other activities related to the handling and management of high-hazard, high-consequence materials and waste, DOE said in a press release.
The traineeship will begin in the fall and be open to students already admitted at that time to an existing robotics program, according a Carnegie Mellon press release.
The cooperative arrangement was competitively awarded, DOE said. The agency did not disclose how many bids it received, but did note the competition was open only to schools that already had graduate-level robotics programs.
