Personnel affected by the integration of some parts of the Chemical Science and Technology (CST) and Materials Science and Technology (MST) Divisions into NMT Division have been briefed. This article addresses the larger picture for Actinide Research Quarterly's broader readership including our customers and others who have a stake in our business.
Laboratory Director John C. Browne has set the wheels in motion to integrate the work of two major nuclear facilities, the CMR Building and Technical Area 55-the Plutonium Facility-under a single management structure. When the integration is complete, the Laboratory will be better able to fulfill its mission as steward of the nuclear weapons stockpile and to reduce the global nuclear danger while successfully meeting the challenges of operating nuclear facilities in today's regulatory environment.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory is the only place in the nation now that can do weapons work for the Department of Energy's Defense Programs Office (DOE/DP) with plutonium, the basic material of the nation's nuclear weapons. Other facilities such as those at Rocky Flats and more recently at Livermore have ceased their work, other than basic research, with plutonium. It is therefore imperative that weapons-plutonium-related work at the Laboratory be accomplished to the highest standards to preserve that capability.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) was charged by Congress with the oversight of the nation's nuclear weapons complex. The DNFSB, along with DOE/DP and the DOE Environment, Safety, and Health Office scrutinized the complex with the goal of correcting many of the problems the complex was confronting at the time. In 1994, under this scrutiny, the management of TA-55 voluntarily stood down operations at TA-55 to evaluate the facility's safety as it affected workers and the public. The short-term result was a drop in productivity, but the long-term result, once work resumed, was enhanced performance in all aspects of the facility operation. The improvements in efficiency, productivity, and safety are largely a result of following "formality of operations," including well thought-out planning for both research and production activities and adherence to carefully considered, approved operating procedures, balanced according to hazards. The Plutonium Facility is now recognized by the DNFSB as "best-in-class" for implementing integrated safety management in a nuclear materials research and development environment.
The experience of TA-55 in making these improvements will be brought to bear on operations at the CMR Building involving actinide materials. The building is 45 years old and suffers from a long-term lack of funding to maintain and modernize it to present standards. Around 1984 the Laboratory proposed a new Special Nuclear Materials Laboratory (SNML) to replace the CMR Building; however, the SNML project was put on hold indefinitely. Instead, a decade later, a decision was made to upgrade the CMR Building. The difficulties of identifying the building's deficiencies and estimating the cost to overcome them, as well as an evaluation of formality of operations in the building, has drawn serious criticism from the DNFSB, the DOE, and the University of California, and essentially a vote of "no confidence" that actinide work within the building could be done safely with long-term consistency. This was even after operations in the building stood down to improve formality of operations and then began to restart as a number of improvements were made. The DOE identified the management of multiple divisions and groups performing actinide R&D in the building as an impediment to the Laboratory's ability to sustain the necessary level of formality of operations. This opinion was shared by a group of external nuclear facility experts who have been providing a mentoring service to the Laboratory since the TA-55 shutdown.
Thus, the decision was made to incorporate the major nuclear material and actinide analytical chemistry activities of both the TA-55 and CMR operations, which include some aspects of both CST and MST as well as NMT. Further, the NMT Division is now under the Laboratory's Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons. The resulting organization will be patterned around the most successful elements and technical capabilities in plutonium and uranium metallurgy, actinide chemistry, and actinide ceramics of each division to support stockpile stewardship, actinide R&D, legacy cleanup, nuclear materials management, environmental and waste management, nuclear materials disposition, and nuclear energy programs.
"The combined materials and chemistry capabilities and the
intellectual power housed in these two facilities (TA-55 and CMR) are
essential for the continued success of DP's stockpile stewardship
programs at Los Alamos."
Vic Reis,
Assistant
Secretary
for Defense Programs,
Department
of Energy
The overall guiding principles of the integration are safety first; efficient integration of people, projects, and capabilities; and operational excellence. The new organization should result in improvements to existing capabilities and performance, ensuring regulatory compliance and safe operations and fulfillment of opportunities to reduce costs and increase efficiency.
The CST and MST divisions will remain strong Laboratory divisions making significant contributions to the Laboratory's mission and programs. Actinide projects funded by Laboratory Directed Research and Development funds will be coordinated through the Seaborg Institute (see Winter 97-98 issue of Actinide Research Quarterly, p. 9).
Under the reorganization, the CMR Building is expected to function as a multiprogram institutional facility capable of supporting Laboratory missions for the next ten years. As the work in the facility becomes more productive, it is expected to draw increasing program support and projects, which will, in turn, enhance the CMR Building's technical capabilities in actinde research. The integration will eliminate redundancies in infrastructure as well as in technical and programmatic activities. The goal will remain for the newly integrated NMT Division to provide on-schedule, in-budget delivery of projects to its customers.
Reported by Ann Mauzy, CIC-1.
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