DEFENSE NUCLEAR FACILITIES SAFETY BOARD

April 13, 2007

MEMORANDUM FOR: J . Kent Fortenberry, Technical Director

FROM:

B . Broderick and C . H. Keilers, Jr.

SUBJECT :

Los Alamos Report for Week Ending April 13, 2007

Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility : Due to unexpected costs only recently recognized,

LANL is starting to demobilize the Waste Management Risk Mitigation project, which involved

constructing a new Hazard Category 2 pump house and tank facility, now 75 % complete ; NNSA has

asked for an explanation . This project was intended to increase low-activity liquid waste storage and

address concerns that arose during the Cerro Grande fire (site rep weeklies 4/7/06, 1/27/06, 8/30/02) .

Contaminated Injury Investigation : Last week, LA-LL management released the investigation report

for the CMR and TA-55 contaminated wound incidents that occurred in January (site rep weekly

3/9/07) . The exposures to affected personnel are still being determined . NNSA appears to have

accepted the lab's investigation. LANL is developing a corrective action plan.

Plutonium Facility (TA-55) : Weaknesses in first-line supervision contributed to the above incidents

(site rep weekly 3/9/07) . TA-55 is improving first-line management and span of control, including

posting about 50 to 60 new management positions that will replace current non-managerial team

leader positions . Also, as part of the response to the above incidents, TA-55 management is

conducting a glovebox-by-glovebox inspection ; the LANL criticality safety group recently joined the

inspection team and is simultaneously conducting the annual review of fissile material operations .

On Monday, this joint team discovered two staging gloveboxes in an aqueous processing room that

had liquid lines that were valved-out but not disconnected or locked-out, as required by the criticality

safety posting ; the lines were subsequently locked-out. This was a good catch and illustrates the value

of such periodic reviews for continuously improving facility safety .

Transuranic Waste Operations : LANL continues to make progress toward startup of the highactivity waste drum campaign in the WCRR repackaging facility, but the schedule appears

i ncreasingly. at risk (site rep weekly 3/30/07) . Specifically, NNSA has approved the exception to the

DOE startup order (DOE 0 425 .1 C) and has informally provided final comments on the WCRR safety

basis but has slipped issuance of a safety evaluation report (SER) by 10 days, to Apr 23r a

While LANL believes that they will be ready for an operational readiness review (ORR) by mid-May,

the SER slippage could delay finalizing procedures, training and qualifying operators, and conducting

the initial periodic inspections and surveillances of safety systems - thereby impacting readiness for a

mid-May ORR. That said, further delay in WCRR startup could eventually impact disposition of both

low and high activity drums, which has safety implications for Area G (site rep weekly 1/5/07) .

Contractor Assurance System (CAS) : LANL is implementing the CAS, but CAS maturity still

appears several years away, considering that : • the late discovery of problems with the Waste

Management Risk Mitigation Project are possibly linked to the maturity level of CAS ; • LANL

managers are still having difficulties using the issue management software (LIMTS), which is evolving ; •

many scheduled assessments are being delayed ; • numerous long-standing corrective actions from

occurrence reports are now being rapidly but not necessarily effectively closed (site rep weekly 12/1/06) .