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Can Los Alamos Meet Its Future Nuclear Challenges?

Balancing the Need to Expand Capabilities While Reducing Capacity

Editor's note: Tim George is head of the Nuclear Materials Technology (NMT) Division. In this, his first editorial for Actinide Research Quarterly, he discusses some of the challenges facing the division.

NMT Division Director Tim George.

Since the early 1980s, the vast array of Department of Energy (DOE) facilities once devoted to the study and use of actinide materials has undergone a dramatic restructuring. Sites such as Mound, Ohio; Pinellas, Fla.; Hanford, Wash.; and Rocky Flats, Colo., which once formed the backbone of the nationıs weapons complex, have either closed outright or exchanged well-defined production and support missions for goals of decontamination and decommissioning.

DOE's remaining active sites are handicapped in the near term by deteriorating nuclear and high-hazard facilities, and infrastructure budgets that in most cases are inadequate to address a half-century of accumulated liabilities.

Although also burdened with its share of aging facilities, Los Alamos is unique in that it continues to operate the nation's only full-service plutonium facility. Building PF-4, which is located at TA-55, is both the newest (it opened in 1978) and only remaining facility in the DOE complex with the capability to conduct operations with all isotopes and chemical forms of plutonium, as well as other actinides. These diverse capabilities are packed into approximately 80,000 square feet of nuclear laboratory space.

Los Alamos also maintains significant capabilities for actinide research and processing in a much older facility, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) Building, which opened in 1952. The CMR Building consists of seven wings that house two banks of hot cells, laboratories designed for actinide materials science and analytical chemistry, and unique capabilities for working with actinide metals.

The CMR Building, which opened in 1952 and consists of seven wings that house two banks of hot cells, laboratories designed for actinide materials science and analytical chemistry, and unique capabilities for working actinide metals.

The seven wings of the CMR Building originally contained more than 50,000 square feet of nuclear laboratory space. By 2001, however, degradation of critical support systems resulted in a suspension of activities in one wing, increasingly stringent requirements for operational safety resulted in suspension of operations in a second, and planned decommissioning of a third wing reduced the amount of usable nuclear laboratory space to approximately 28,000 square feet.

In the 1990s, Los Alamos embarked on an aggressive program of upgrades to ensure continued safe operation of the CMR Building through 2010. By early 2001, approximately $76 million had been spent on the CMR upgrades, of which about one-half consisted of urgent maintenance items, with the balance directed toward upgrading building systems to meet regulatory requirements and to ensure continued safe operations.

Planned and completed upgrades included HEPA filter replacement in operational wings, upgrades to the fire protection system, improvements to exhaust stack monitoring systems, major upgrades of facility electrical systems, and safety-driven improvements to the building personnel accountability system.

Recent experience has demonstrated that substantial additional maintenance will be required to reduce the probability of unplanned outages resulting from the failure of aging and obsolete building systems.

Together, the Plutonium Facility and the CMR Building represent a lifeboat for preserving the nationıs most critical nuclear technologies until they can be transitioned to the facilities of the future. In the near term, an increasing workload in support of production and support missions is competing for limited CMR and PF-4 floor space.

These missions currently include pilot production of nuclear defense components; surveillance of defense components; fabrication of components used in subcritical experiments; small-scale production of plutonium heat sources, analytical standards, and advanced nuclear fuels; materials surveillance; development and implementation of technologies for materials disposition; and investigative research.

Of these missions, the most difficult to prioritize is investigative research. However, history has repeatedly demonstrated that aggressive programs to understand todayıs bench-top curiosities are the only certain means to avoid being on the wrong end of tomorrowıs technological surprises.

The challenge then, for the Nuclear Materials Technology (NMT) Division, which operates both PF-4 and the CMR Building, is twofold: to ensure continued success in current and future programmatic missions, and to preserve and expand technical capabilities while reducing the space and resources devoted to excess capacities.

The most critical factors to ensuring NMT's success in completing programmatic assignments are adequate and sustained budgets for facility operations and maintenance. Although the CMR upgrades project has addressed the most critical deficiencies in the facility, additional investment will be required to address the failure of aging and obsolete nonsafety-related systems.

The entrance to the TA-55 Plutonium Facility.

In the case of the Plutonium Facility, the outlook is for increased facility maintenance and operational costs as the facility ages. Because PF-4 has operated for nearly 25 years with no comprehensive plan for capital reinvestment and with limited budgets for facility maintenance and operation, unplanned outages will become increasingly common as components in key facility systems reach the end of their design lifetimes.

In addition, facility resources are stretched even further by requirements to meet regulatory and operational standards that were not in place, or even envisioned, at the time the facility was constructed.

The goal of reducing excess capacities while preserving and expanding technical capabilities will be much more difficult to achieve than completion of well-defined programmatic assignments.

The key factors to success in this area are by nature subjective. Assumptions must be made on the probabilities of increased or decreased program requirements for the outputs of various processes. Predictions must also be made on the significance and operational requirements of emergent technologies, such as room-temperature ionic liquids, that offer the promise of reducing the need for, or even replacing, current separations processes.

Both sets of assumptions and predictions must then be compared with existing facility configurations to identify specific laboratories and glove boxes (currently devoted to excess process capacities) that may be suitable for reconfiguration. Finally, funds must be identified to reconfigure these laboratories for other uses.

With sufficient budget, there are significant opportunities to reclaim the space occupied by excess process capacities. In PF-4, for example, which was originally designed as the nation's premier actinide research and development facility, a portion of the facility remains configured to separate and purify relatively large quantities of plutonium and other actinides.

Although these capabilities made significant contributions to the nation's defense in the early 1980s, it is unlikely that they will ever again be required to operate on that scale. Consolidation of the separations processes into a smaller footprint offers the potential to free up space that can then be used to support increasing programmatic workloads, emergent technologies, or waste reduction and treatment processes required to meet new regulatory standards.

Significant questions remain as to how long PF-4 and the CMR Building can be expected to remain operational given current and expected facility budgets and when new facilities will be available to house trans-itioned operations. Questions also remain about the long-term effects of compromises necessary to maintain production, programmatic support, research, and development within the limited space available in these two facilities.

Given the long lead time needed for construction of nuclear facilities and the limited remaining lifetime of the CMR Building, decisions must be made soon on the size, location, and capabilities of the DOEıs reconfigured nuclear complex.

At Los Alamos, work needs to accelerate on replacing the CMR Building with a new facility (or a set of smaller, cheaper facilities), and on development and implementation of the Integrated Nuclear Park (INP) concept proposed by Gen. John Gordon, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The INP, if implemented, would consolidate all Los Alamos nuclear operations into one area.


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