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December 2, 2019 Permalink for this letter (wait until early Monday). Please forward! Other Letters
This letter: Safety Board: The Los Alamos plutonium facility does not adequately protect the public Dear friends – "We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming" to bring you the following news. Some time around Thanksgiving the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB, Board) published an August staff report, summarizing several longstanding concerns with the safety posture ("basis") of Building PF-4, the main plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). PF-4 began operations in 1978 without many modern safety features, such as a ventilation system that would maintain negative pressure in the building in the event of a serious accident such as a major earthquake or fire. It is now known that Los Alamos can and has experienced earthquakes equal or greater than magnitude 7 on the Richter scale, with far greater accelerations than were used in the design of most Los Alamos buildings, including PF-4. In the dry language of nuclear safety engineers, the report concludes
These conclusions assume that the building itself would not collapse in an earthquake, but no one can be sure of that until LANL completes its dynamic structural analysis, at least, which will take at least another two years. [See also note 1.] Study Group board member Bob Alvarez and I met with senior members of the DNFSB staff in November to discuss some of the issues mentioned in this report, not yet released (or mentioned to us by the careful staff). This was one of roughly three dozen such visits to the Board in which we have stressed the importance of fixing PF-4's major deficiencies. NNSA and LANL had agreed since 2006 to fix PF-4's problems, and Congress had funded various projects to do so. You can see lists of these major deficiencies in Appendix C of this report, with schedule slippages. In February of this year the Trump Administration Los Alamos NNSA team unanimously approved PF-4's safety posture without fixing PF-4's deficiencies. They did so by making a number of highly-questionable assumptions, as this and predecessor reports explain. For example, a post-seismic fire in PF-4 was found by NNSA to cause an estimated dose to the postulated most exposed members of the public in an accident (at Elk Ridge Trailer Park, map) of 219 rem, many times the maximum permitted under Department of Energy (DOE) guideline (a "small fraction" of 25 rem; see p. 1, note 1, here). To shrink 219 rem to less than 25 rem (never mind the "small fraction" part), NNSA assumed that the old PF-4 building, after suffering a massive earthquake and fire, would barely leak even in a wind. After at most a 5 minute evacuation period, the exit doors would stay tightly sealed. No firefighters would go in. (For details see the highly-technical DNFSB Technical Report 44: Los Alamos National Laboratory Plutonium Facility Leak Path Factor Methodology, November 12, 2019). You get the idea. "Baffle 'em with bullshit." Didn't work on the DNFSB. At this point, expansion of plutonium missions at LANL is based on the assumption that these problems will be "solved," one way or another. The Trump Administration seems to think that the way to get rid of these problems is to disempower, overrule, and exclude the witnesses and truth-tellers, i.e. DNFSB. We made a web page to chronicle that battle but have not been able to keep up with every twist and turn since May, when the page was last updated. Also in May we made this chart of major deficiencies with the projected dates of their resolution provided schedules do not slip further, a very optimistic assumption. Completion dates are perilously close to LANL's statutory pit production deadlines. And after just a few years DOE's estimated end of life for PF-4 begins to loom just ahead, a date which we believe would be accelerated by any attempt to "run the facility hard," for example by running multiple production shifts -- which NNSA has now privately said will be necessary. We now think PF-4 will never be brought up to modern safety standards. The pace of improvement is so slow and halting that new problems are likely to surface before presently-known ones can be fixed. Greg Mello Note: 1. Seismic failure of a single internal column would (not could) overload the adjacent columns and their capitals and so produce catastrophic building failure: At issue is whether the facility [PF-4] might collapse in the event of a massive earthquake, an issue that previous studies have ruled out but one about which the Board remains concerned. That concern is centered on round columns that support the facility and informed by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that collapsed elevated highways in the San Francisco Bay Area. In public comments at a Capitol Hill Club event this summer [2013], DNFSB member Jack Mansfield explained the Board’s concerns. The facility, built in the late 1970s, is “brittle,” Mansfield said. “It was discovered after this facility was built that large buildings, to be survivable in serious earthquakes, have to have a bit of ductility. It was also discovered after the Loma Prieta earthquake that round columns, if accelerated up into the plywood they support, crumble. Those two vulnerabilities were identified early, but they’re not built into PF-4.” |
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