LANL Could Get Job of Dismantling Bombs
By John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal Staff WriterLos Alamos National Laboratory, already busy building parts for new nuclear warheads, could be assigned the job of taking apart old weapons, as well.
If the project goes forward, Los Alamos would be asked to pick up the slack left by a major dismantlement plant in South Carolina that is years behind schedule and more than a billion dollars over budget, according to a report obtained by the Journal.
Plutonium bomb parts would be dismantled at Los Alamos. The plutonium would be sent to the National Nuclear Security Administration's Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where it would be turned into fuel for electricity-generating nuclear power plants.
The New Mexico nuclear weapons laboratory is being considered for the job because of delays in completing the Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility at Savannah River. The proposed plant would take apart plutonium pits — the explosive cores of nuclear weapons — and convert the dangerously radioactive plutonium into a plutonium-oxygen mixture suitable for use in nuclear power plant fuel.
The plant at Savannah River that was to do the work had an initial price tag of $346 million when it was launched in 2000, and the plant was to be completed and operating by 2004. The current price tag has grown to at least $2.4 billion, with actual construction work yet to begin. The current estimated completion date, according to federal budget documents, is 2019.
That delay poses a problem because of agreements with Russia aimed at reducing both nations' stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium.
Faced with the potential for years of delay, the National Nuclear Security Administration completed a study in May on the feasibility of using Los Alamos' plutonium lab complex to do some of the work in the interim.
Los Alamos set up a small-scale line of plutonium processing equipment in the 1990s to develop and test the equipment to be used in the South Carolina plant. While it was never intended for full-scale operations, the equipment is still there and could be modified to do the job on a modest scale, the study found.
Los Alamos was already planning to use the existing equipment in 2010 to process more than 2 tons of plutonium. The study suggests that work could be continued and expanded to process another 10 tons.
National Nuclear Security Administration spokeswoman Casey Ruberg declined comment, noting that the study was marked "official use only," meaning it was not supposed to be made public.
The work would employ more than 130 people at its peak at Los Alamos, according to the study.
There have been repeated questions in recent years about Los Alamos' ability to expand plutonium work in its 1970s-era concrete laboratory and manufacturing site. The lab is currently also making plutonium weapon cores in the same building, a job that could grow substantially under a plan now under consideration by the federal government. In an August 2006 report, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board questioned whether Los Alamos was capable of an even more modest expansion in bomb dismantlement work.
Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark said the lab could do the weapon dismantlement work if needed.
"It's doable if we're asked," Roark said.
23 comments:
Noun 1. futility - uselessness as a consequence of having no practical result
More production work for LANL, yum, yum!
Temp-work at best, if we can get it. 130 jobs will not make or break lANL. More importantly, it has become obvious that we (LANL) has lost and continues to do so, the "status" that we once had as a preimer National Lab. We are now viewed as a 'fix-it' shop, with no real Science. Hey, whats next a "Jiffy Lube" for the nukes? We are no longer a National Lab, we are now Rectal Temp Service.
You guys are just all jealous because you don't have any stable funding.
"Los Alamos spokesman Kevin Roark said the lab could do the weapon dismantlement
work if needed."
LANL already does weapon dismantlement work. This would be on a larger scale, Kevin.
I am having trouble seeing the downside to this proposal. LANL did the development and demonstration work for MOX conversion and was highly successful. I for one would rather see MOX come here as production work than continue our bloated and pointless Pit Manufacturing activities. For one thing, accepting MOX would demonstrate to Congress a real commitment to undertake threat reduction work of all stripes.
Our management will do "peice-work", doesnt look like we have a long term plan does it?
Come on, folks. You can do better than the pathetic comments above to bash this proposal.
I mean, a LANL-orginated, LANL-developed, LANL-demonstrated process (ARIES) that solved several honest-go-god technical issues and used a good deal of plutonium science to do so. I mean, you should be all over that.
Of course, LANL has done all of this, but saw the work sent to Savannah River as part of more dubious "load-leveling" (ever notice how most of the good ideas in the NNSA come from LANL and get sent elsewhere to make work for other sites?)
Of course you're going to spin this a production, grunt-level work. Why look into the 10-years of science and R&D behind this, with goals of waste reduction, safe storage, and improved worker safety? It's all on the web if you care to read. Just easier to let your reflexive ignorance take over I suppose.
As a follow-up to the last post, please stay on the look-out for the next issue of Actinide Research Quarterly, which will have 6 or 7 articles dedicated to the R&D and tech development behind each ARIES module.
To the creator of the blog----you might get a laugh from a letter in Dear Abby. The writer signed it Moving on in NM. A fan of your blog:)
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DEAR ABBY: I read an article in our local paper a while ago that said good employees who leave a company usually do so because of their boss.
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"Thanks for asking me to stay on, but I respectfully decline. I will be self-employed from now on. However, if in the future I ever feel the need to be publicly humiliated, blind-sided, ostracized and called a spy, be distrusted and disciplined by superiors for no good reason, fight for wages that are rightfully mine, stabbed in the back by fellow employees, used as a pawn in executive rivalries, or (especially) chewed out when you're having a bad day, I'll get back to you!" -- MOVING ON IN NEW MEXICO
DEAR MOVING ON: I'm printing your letter. I hope that seeing it in print will be cathartic. I wish you good luck in your new career, where someday you may be a boss yourself. And if you are, I'm sure you will create a healthier office environment than the one you left.
Alright, so my friend just got fired for testing positive on the piss test. How many victims has this bullshit program targeted????
Who's in charge of this and what are the real numbers. I was told that 200+ have lost their jobs. Is this right????
How many false positives have resulted in terminations????
Research and technology development for ARIES was right up LANL's alley. Production work using the technology is not. NNSA's failure to find, fund, and complete a production plant shouldn't be an excuse to dump a large-scale (compared to ARIES) project on the site that developed it. That's why LANL doesn't assemble nuclear weapons, or fill boost reserviors that were developed here. There aren't very many high-powered scientists at Pantex. Nor were there at Rocky Flats. LANL can't survive in a recognizable state with a slew of new high-risk, high-technology, but essentially blue-collar jobs. The high-paid Ph.D.s will leave and the once-proud "birthplace of the atomic bomb" will become just another small town of better-than-average educated rural hicks making an average of 60 or 70 k a year, except of course for the Bectel managers making triple that, at least. Then, the isolation will eventually finally kill this unwanted and artificial community in northern New Mexico, which will gratefully return to the eighteenth century.
Pshaw! 19th century. We're finally getting a railroad and everything.
I am not with LANL and know nothing really about bombs. But, I have a question: If you are going to be dismantling these bombs, isn't it dangerous to move the bombs in the first place?
7:57 pm: "How many false positives have resulted in terminations????"
Why are you assuming this was a false positive? DOE's procedure allows for significant review and retesting before termination. Seems like your friend was either noncooperative or guilty.
9:13 pm: "I am not with LANL and know nothing really about bombs. But, I have a question: If you are going to be dismantling these bombs, isn't it dangerous to move the bombs in the first place?"
No one is talking about disassembling "bombs." That is done at Pantex. We are talking about disassembling pits that have been removed from bombs at Pantex and then shipped to LANL. These are just hunks of plutonium and other materials with no potential for a "mushroom cloud."
no potential for a "mushroom cloud.
is there any possibility of a criticality accident?
Q - How many false positives have resulted in terminations???? (7:57 PM)
A - We'll never know, and LANS could care less. They need to get rid of LANL employees and this means is as good as any. You think they give a rat's ass about the collateral damage?
What inquiring minds really want to know is... how many members of LANS upper level management team (Dir, Dep Dir, PADs, ADs) have been piss tested to date? Are they being excluded from the Z-number random testing pool?
These are just hunks of plutonium and other materials with no potential for a "mushroom cloud." (9:37 PM)
That's seems like a mis-leading statement. There is a concept called "detonation-in-place" and it's something that DOE security teams worry about a great deal.
is there any possibility of a criticality accident?
----
Anytime you work with large quantities of fissile material, there is a remote possibility for a crit accident, whether its a pit, SNM in solution, or hunks of SNM. This is why we have criticality engineers who model these things to keep the handlers and workers safe. Then, we put in administrative and engineering controls to properly deal with the material, whether it be proper storage configurations, limits on quantities in a specific location, etc. etc.
Do most of you here understand that LANL has done "production" for most of its history, including nearly continuously at TA-55 since it opened in 1978? And at levels *larger* in terms of quantity of material to be handled than what's proposed in either the ARIES mission or pit production?
Ok, history review for the ignorant. LANL has produced pits through the mid 50s for stockpile, and continually until 1992 for testing. We still make detonators and until recently, neutron targets. We make calibration sources for the rest of world for nuclear instrumentation. We also make reference samples for chemical tests as well nuclear isotopes for nuclear medicine.
TA-55 has produced: 2 production runs of Pu-238 batteries for the Jupiter and Saturn probes (these took 3-5 years and hundred of people, sound familiar?); a core for the SP-100 space reactor, and roughly 1500-2000 kg of purified plutonium PER YEAR in the mid-80s to supplement Rocky Flats. All production. All done while we were a grand science lab. And oh, ARIES has been dismantling a substantial number of pits over the last five years as part of a "demonstration" run.
The proposed pit manufacturing and rough-doubling of the ARIES dismantlements are no larger in impact than the above missions. Enough fear-mongering and misstatements. These missions are compatible with LANL as a science lab, and we should be thankful that the US government see fits to pay to have these jobs done right here amongst a shrinking complex.
7/14 10:45 pm: "There is a concept called "detonation-in-place" and it's something that DOE security teams worry about a great deal."
True, however the question had to do with potential safety problems in moving the items. Of course security during shipment and storage is always a concern. However, not to dismantle pits because of this concern is obviously counterproductive. Once they're dismantled, the concern goes away. Also, as raised by another poster, there are always criticality concerns. Strict conservative rules for shipment and storage of pits exist and these have been effective if followed.
9:13, you are a breath of fresh air. Thanks for the excellent survey of LANL's "production" activities and the correct assessment that these activities have always been deemed compatible with science in the past.
My only minor quibble is that the mentality of the current pit manufacturing managers is not just anti-science but anti-engineering and anti-thinking in general. It need not be this way, but it currently is.
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