LANL Criticality Safety Personnel at Critical Mass for Planned Pit Production, Review Says

May 25, 2021
By Exchange Monitor

Los Alamos National Laboratory has hired enough criticality safety personnel to support plannedmanufacturing of nuclear-weapon cores at the New Mexico laboratory, but staff churn among these crucialworkers is more common than the lab believes, a new DOE review said.

Lab management and operations contractor Triad National Security “has adequately managed the training andqualification of additional analysts and has the 27 analysts identified by Triad as needed to support increasedpit production rates,” DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments wrote in a report published May 21. “However,future attrition may exceed Triad’s current hiring plan.”

Triad’s current staffing plan budgets a 10% attrition rate for Criticality Safety Analysts, but the average rate ofattribution is more like 16%, according to the Enterprise Assessment office’s report, “

Assessment of the TriadNational Security, LLC Nuclear Criticality Safety Program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
.” The office conducted its remote review from November 2020 throughJanuary and plans a visit to Los Alamos “within a year,” the report said.

If all goes according to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) plan, the Los Alamos NationalLaboratory’s PF-4 Plutonium Facility will begin casting multiple war-reserve plutonium pits — the sphericalcores of nuclear-weapon primary stages — in fiscal year 2024. Upgrading PF-4 and some surroundinginfrastructure, an effort called the Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project will cost roughly $4 billion, theproject estimated in a recently approved critical decision 1 review.

These pits will initially be for the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead: one of two nuclear-armedtips planned for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles slated to replace Minuteman III missilesstarting in 2030 or so. In 2019 and 2020, Los Alamos cast development pits for W87-1. Essentially, a practicepit for the lab to study so that they can verify whether designs, equipment and people are ready to make thejump to production later this decade.

These were among the first pits Los Alamos had made in the better part of a decade. PF-4 stopped making pitsin 2011 in part due to a widely reported criticality safety violation at the only working pit-production plant inthe U.S. Since then, groups outside New Mexico, including the independent federal Defense Nuclear FacilitiesSafety Board, have kept a close and critical eye on Los Alamos’ criticality safety program.

The Office of Enterprise Assessments’ recent report is the latest public accounting by one of these groups. In it,the Washington-based DOE office said that while deficiencies remain with Los Alamos’ criticality safetycontrols, “[n]one of the identified deficiencies pose a credible risk for a criticality accident due to independent, robust controls and additional margin in the evaluations.”

A criticality is when some mass of fissionable atoms is dense enough to sustain an energy-releasing chainreaction.
The NNSA plans two pit factories: the one at Los Alamos and a larger, newer companion facility called theSavannah River Plutonium Production Facility to be built at the Aiken, S.C., Savannah River Site. The two aresupposed to combine for 80 pits annually by 2030, including 30 at Los Alamos and 50 at Savannah River. LosAlamos is supposed to make 10 pits a year in 2024 and ramp up to 30 annually by 2026. Their combinedlifecycle cost is somewhere above $30 billion over 50 years, NNSA estimates.