LANL’s “Bolas Grande” project gets briefing from “Six-Sigma Blackbelt”

I haven’t had time to post very much here, but today I will make an exception.

Because today we learned that down in the corporate-Strangelovian rabbit-hole that is Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the “Bolas Grande” (Big Balls) project, a colorful moniker subsequently bleached into the “Confinement Vessel Disposition” (CVD) project, got a briefing in early March from a “Six Sigma Blackbelt,” according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB’s) recently-released March 7 Weekly Site Report.

Which of us, who live so far from corporate Quality Assurance circles, even knew such titles existed?  Not me.

Folks never seem to ask why there is a Bolas Grande project.  It’s an important question because this project is the long pole in the tent in the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) building departure schedule, i.e. it establishes the schedule that keeps people in that dangerous building until 2019.  Yes, there is analytical chemistry (AC) going on in CMR, but what’s new?  Supposedly all that was leaving the building by 2010, and there were deadlines before that which LANL blew through also.  There are plenty of places at LANL and elsewhere which could be easily set up to do AC, and some are set up already.

The supposed justification for the massive Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF) was to get out of that dangerous CMR building.  But is there any actual evident hurry to do so?  No, and there never has been.  When is the dilatory LANL going to move out of that building and tear it down, and cart away the radioactive and chemically-contaminated portions of rubble for disposal (where?  on site?  elsewhere at LANL, such as one of the four Area G expansion/replacement zones identified by LANL?  In Utah?  Nevada?)  (In case anybody didn’t know, LANL’s main technical area (TA-3), where CMR is located, is dotted with contaminated zones, like much of the rest of the lab.)

Fewer than 100 people work in CMR, as we all learned at a DNFSB hearing in Santa Fe two years ago (transcript, evening session, p. 79).  There were just three wings of the 9-wing building operating in 2012.  I believe there are just two wings — Wing 9, where the CVD project will take place, and Wing 7 — operating today.

There is a significant chance that the CMR building will collapse in even a fairly small earthquake.  LANL estimates a 1-in-36 chance that CMR will collapse within the next 10 years (Congressional Research Service, p. 21).  DNFSB gives the building a 1-in-55 chance of collapsing in a decade (ibid).  The reinforcing in the thin (2″ to 4″) concrete floors is reportedly chicken wire (from the same source, probably LANL-speak for stucco wire or something heavier, but the point is the same).  The failure modes are catastrophic: the building would pancake, killing most of the people who work there.

Meanwhile, leaking radioactive waste pipe joints in the basement are covered with plastic and duct tape.  Those slipshod arrangements were made and accepted by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) only because LANL promised to leave that building by 2010, in part because the CMRR project (including the first building, the Radiological Laboratory, Utility, and Office Building, RLUOB, the outfitting of labs in which has been delayed year after year and is not yet done) was to be ready by then.  LANL (by which we mean LANS, Los Alamos National Security, LLC) however eventually fell behind in the inspections that were part of the Jerry-rigged plan, causing one or more radioactive waste spills in the basement.  The story of CMR, ancient and modern, is a much longer story than we have time to lay out here.

But the above question — why is there a Bolas Grande project — is important.  The answer, we believe, is that these “confined vessels” contain Pu-242 (“Cider”), an isotope in short supply that is precious to nuclear weapons designers.  And who knows when new kinds of nuclear weapons might have to be designed?  Gotta stay ready.  Gotta keep your powder — in this case PuO2, made from Pu-242 — dry.  Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, you say?  Why should the “spirit of the CTBT” constrain the nuclear weapons program of this great country?  It’s a spur to innovation, it is — and to funding.  We’re the indispensable nation, after all.  We stand taller, see farther, etc.

These vessels are left over from the “Appaloosa” program at LANL, in which these vessels were used for confined explosions containing plutonium.  Pu-242 has the virtue of having a critical mass ten times that of Pu-239, meaning that an exact copy of a nuclear weapon primary (atomic bomb) can be made at full scale and detonated inside one of these tanks, with as much diagnostics as can be mustered, certainly with external high-speed x-rays.  LANL abandoned the program in circa 1970 when a simple worst-case analysis showed that, basically, the lab and town of Los Alamos might need to be abandoned, with hundreds if not thousands of fatalities, in the event of a catastrophic tank failure under the most adverse wind conditions.  Much more sophisticated analyses are now available but the basic conclusion is the same: these tests are too dangerous to conduct.

Perhaps readers, understanding our time constraints, will forgive me if I do not explain in depth why Pu-242 tests are not needed, or at least part of how such tests relate to planned controversial “scaled experiments” involving plutonium and to the subcritical tests conducted at U1a facility at the underground Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), or provide further details on the CVD project, which has been pending for many years.

Meanwhile some folks (with or without robots) have now got to scrape out the Pu-242, or at least that part of it which has not been driven into the steel.  Of course there will be Pu-242-containing diamonds too.  Not a girl’s best friend.

Anchor Tom Joles at KOB TV had a priceless investigative piece in the late 1990s about these same used Appaloosa vessels, which were then (as they are now) sitting behind the main plutonium facility PF-4 (visible in Google maps here) and the Appaloosa program.  In that televised story, the head of TA-55 (shortly thereafter removed) admitted to rather a great deal, on camera.  LANL and the Department of Energy (DOE), at that time, had aimed to start up Appaloosa again but thankfully cooler heads (including at DNFSB, bless them) prevailed.  Bringing plutonium and high explosives together is a little dicey.  At Pantex that’s done underground, in a Gravel Gertie.

Unused Appaloosa vessels (photo below) were stockpiled at TA-60 until circa 2005, according to the historical imagery at Google Earth.   Dangerously, but also ironically (no pun intended), the last lot of Appaloosa vessels, procured in 1978, were either made of unsuitable steel or misfabricated, an unpleasant fact rather belatedly discovered in 1986 when the vessel cutouts were located and sent for testing.  (In the words of that memo, quality assurance got “off track.”  There apparently were no “Six Sigma Blackbelts” available.)  Quality varied, but the vessels were basically too brittle and could have broken, especially if used on a cool day — of which Los Alamos has plenty.  The ironic part is that the steel required, or the fabrication quality, was apparently not available from any U.S. supplier in 1990.  A different, better, steel was being tested for naval shipbuilding needs and was specified by LANL in its 1994 contract for more Appaloosa vessels.  Basically the same group that lobbied Carter for more nuclear spending, and which came into power under Reagan to “make America strong” (and expand and upgrade the nuclear arsenal), weakened this and many other parts of the U.S. industrial base by its neoliberal economic policies.

Appaloosa was and is a very secret, compartmented program.  We won a $100,000 legal settlement to learn more about it, all of which went to our attorney.  Not even the top DOE official at Los Alamos is allowed to know all that goes on there, as a former area manager once told us, even including the purposes of some new construction.  “What is that new building in TA-XX,” that Area Manager, responsible for (among everything else) safety at LANL, asked the NNSA Administrator.  “I can’t tell you,” was the answer.

The reason the CVD project exists, and the biggest reason people still work in the dangerous CMR building, is to maximize confidence in new warheads designs under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).  Even for that very dubious, pathetic goal, Appaloosa has been superseded by the subcritical tests conducted underground at the NNSS U1a site, the data stream from which has increased by a fantastic factor from what was available even a few years ago.

Some of you might be amused by the photo below of a used confinement vessel, taken in 2009 in downtown Albuquerque next to an I-40 on-ramp.  (Unlike, as far as we can tell, Iran’s, this is the real deal.)  We hope it had no plutonium in it; it’s gone now.

Many interesting details could be added (and really important details about the CVD program), but time presses.  Current policy questions revolve around this one: why need it take so long to get out of the CMR building?  What is the benefit, if any, of continuing with the CVD project?  If it must be continued, why in the world need it take so long to complete?  Even if the CVD program will take another 5 years, why couldn’t the AC work and employees be moved out sooner, leaving employees in Wing 9 only, which is somewhat stronger than the rest?  And where is the CMR disposition plan?  Will that take years to produce after 2019, or will LANL actually think ahead?

 

Save