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LANL's plutonium facility appears seismically sound, safety board say
By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Sep 5, 2023
Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium facility can structurally withstand a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, the most intense seismic event likely to happen on the Pajarito Plateau, according to a peer-reviewed analysis a government watchdog found convincing enough to support.
Lab officials consider the seismic readiness an important finding as the lab gears up to make 30 warhead triggers, or pits, per year in the facility anti-nuclear critics contend isn’t suitable for this level of production.
A Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board official deemed the analysis “a commendable effort.”
“The Board finds that the conclusions of the LANL project team was technically defensible and that the accompanying peer review process was robust,” Joyce Connery, the safety board’s chairwoman, wrote in an August letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.
Connery added the board considers the lab’s approach in assessing the seismic risk for the 45-year-old facility, known as PF-4, as a best practice the U.S. Energy Department should apply at other defense nuclear facilities.
In a memo, Lab Director Thom Mason celebrated the safety board’s positive review.
“It goes without saying that I am excited about this news, given the many years of effort we have expended,” Mason wrote. “This added assurance that our most crucial facility is up to the task of providing cutting-edge solutions to our biggest national security problems could not have come at a better time for our workforce and our nation.”
Connery’s one criticism was there was no comprehensive report on the study, and the lab should consider creating one to improve transparency.
A lab spokeswoman in an email confirmed there were no public reports of the seismic analysis.
The Energy Department, safety board and an independently appointed peer review panel composed of industry experts and academics, versed in seismology, structural engineering and geology, scrutinized the project, wrote lab spokeswoman Laura Ann Mullane.
Experts used computer modeling at the lab to simulate a wide variation of earthquake intensities in a seismic event to gauge the risk of structural failure. It’s an approach that allowed them to include a rare high-magnitude quake — in excess of 7.5 on the Richter scale — as a scenario, she wrote.
An estimated $100 million was spent on seismic upgrades, Mullane added.
The lab sits atop the Pajarito fault system, whose two dozen faults cause regular, mild earthquakes and tremors — enough geologic instability to cause concern among opponents of the lab’s nuclear weapons program and some regional residents.
Mullane wrote the lab and its consultants closely examine the area’s faults and fractures to ensure the plutonium facility meets federal design standards for handling ground motion. There’s also a program to monitor seismic activity to ensure it can be detected and assessed accordingly, she wrote.
An anti-nuclear activist acknowledged the facility’s structure is sturdy enough to withstand a strong earthquake but argued some vital internal systems are not up to seismic code.
The lab lacks a guaranteed supply of water to suppress fires, an alarm system that meets commercial fire codes and a safety-class ventilation system that can prevent a radioactive release, said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.
Many of the glove boxes can be knocked over and broken during an earthquake, Mello said, referring to the sealed compartments with attached gloves that workers use to handle radioactive materials.
During a plutonium facility tour in June, a manager noted the lab was in the process of replacing older glove boxes with ones that are reinforced to hold up under an earthquake, but the manufacturer, swamped with back orders, was stalling the effort.
Mello said the last he checked, the fittings on the fire suppression system could break, and the air ducts could collapse during an earthquake. And the software that measures materials at risk in a disruptive event like an earthquake has glitches, he said.
“Until all these things are fixed, PF-4 does not meet modern safety standards, and no agency has ever said it does,” Mello said, including the safety board.
Mullane insists the lab has bolstered PF-4’s ability to confine any potential release of radiation in an earthquake.
Modifications were made to anchor the electrical components to ensure continued power to the ventilation system during a quake, she wrote, adding crews are vigilant in maintaining the existing ventilation system to ensure it contains a radioactive release in a seismic event.
As a backup measure, fire suppression systems have been upgraded to stave off any such release from an earthquake-caused fire, she added.
Mello disagreed the current ventilation system is enough to confine a radioactive release, and said the safety board doesn’t think so, either.
In a November forum in Santa Fe, Connery and other safety board officials were emphatic that a safety-class confinement system was needed in PF-4.
This system would continue to function during an accident, ensuring radioactive material is captured by filters before it could be released into the environment, they said.
The board first pushed for the system in a letter it sent to nuclear security managers in 2004.
At the forum, Mason argued the current system had enough safety-class components installed in it to be effective.
But while there was disagreement on how well the internal systems would fare in an earthquake, everyone agreed the Cold War-era building would hold up.
“Keeping it [PF-4] safe and secure is one of our Laboratory’s most important jobs, which is why it was upgraded previously to withstand any credible seismic event,” Mason wrote.
Greg Mello published comment:
LANL first became officially aware that its site could experience greater than Richter 7 earthquakes in 1997. The Safety Board made its first intervention, seeking clarity on the seismic safety of LANL's nuclear facilities, in 1998. It has taken 25 years of upgrades and analysis to reach this stage, but as noted in the article LANL still has years of work to achieve seismic safety at its plutonium facility. Then there are the other big buildings at LANL that are in much worse shape. The Sigma Building failed a seismic screening back in the mid-1990s, when only much weaker earthquakes were thought possible at LANL. The Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Building, LANL's largest building, is seismically fragile, and its northern end sits astride an active fault. It is expected to collapse in the event of a modestly-large earthquake. (Apologies for not being quantitative in this note -- NNSA and the DNFSB make these analyses and then they are filed away, in the case of the CMR for almost two decades. In fact there is a 2007 LANL-wide "temporary" exemption from seismic safety requirements, called a "justification for continued operations," written for LANL as a whole, that seems to be forgotten.) These old buildings do not meet federal life safety standards, which are in any case not enforced at LANL. Heck, the ancient fire alarm system at the plutonium facility does not meet commercial fire code standards and is requiring a $250 million line-item replacement job, expected to be completed in 2025 or so. The Safety Board is small and has no enforcement powers, which is why it took a quarter-century to get this far for the plutonium facility. As this article rightly notes, there's a long way to before this one facility comes up to modern safety standards for facilities that handle plutonium and other radioactive materials, to say nothing about the buildings immediately adjacent to it (which like CMR are also expected to break apart in an earthquake, causing water pressure to drop precipitously in the fire mains), or all the rest of the older lab buildings and some newer ones like the Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility (now handling some plutonium as well as most of LANL's tritium) and even the Emergency Operations Center, built almost on top of the Pajarito Fault Zone.
How does this happen? Lack of federal oversight and prime contractor accountability. The LANL attitude is similar to what a prominent Livermore weapons designer (David Dearborn) said to a couple of us in the early 1990s, when I asked what data he really needed to maintain the nuclear stockpile, as opposed to wanted. He said, "If it is possible to get, I definitely need it." It is the same here and now. The entire pit production mission at LANL, which is adding the equivalent of a new national laboratory to LANL, is not needed for the U.S. nuclear deterrent. When Senator Angus King asked NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby whether the U.S. faced a "pit gap" if pit production was delayed, she rightly said "No. It is a hedge." Pit production at LANL is simply a stopgap measure that enables a new warhead that gives Livermore a funding boost and makes the Air Force happy, while supposedly enriching New Mexico and keeping the New Mexico senators happy as well. It is entirely unnecessary from every reasonable perspective, and creates a situation where NNSA is competing with itself to design, build, and staff pit facilities.
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