DEFENSE NUCLEAR FACILITIES SAFETY BOARD 

July 19, 2013 

MEMORANDUM FOR: Steven Stokes, Acting Technical Director 

FROM: Jonathan Plaue, DNFSB Site Representative 

SUBJECT: LLNL Activity Report for Week Ending July 19, 2013 

On Thursday, Chairman Winokur and Board Member Sullivan, accompanied by staff members 

Stokes and Anderson, visited the laboratory. The group received briefings on the status of the 

Livermore Field Office (LFO) and the laboratory contractor’s efforts to improve safety basis 

processes, facility infrastructure, work control, emergency management, nuclear materials and 

waste management, and programmatic operations. The group also walked-down a number of 

laboratory rooms and the loft in the Plutonium Facility. 

Emergency Management: On Wednesday, the contractor conducted their annual full-scale 

emergency response exercise. The year’s scenario involved an accident between vehicles 

transporting transuranic waste and a biological select-agent. Exercise play included response to 

multiple radiologically-contaminated victims and involved participation of the local hospital and 

deployment of the Radiological Assistance Program to survey offsite locations. The after-action 

report should be available in about a month. 

Nuclear Materials Management: The Site Representative recently reviewed the inventory of 

nuclear materials in the Plutonium Facility. The objective of the review was to improve the 

understanding of the current profile of materials as the contractor develops an integrated nuclear 

materials management plan and LFO considers the size of the safety envelope against the 

program of record as part of the annual update process. The following observations are based on 

a snapshot of the inventory provided by contractor: 

 Approximately 88 percent by elemental weight of accountable radioactive material currently 

in the building is categorized as No Defined Use, which means the material is either waste or 

there is no identified programmatic need (i.e., it is likely to be declared waste). Within this 

category, about 46 percent is currently contained in transuranic waste containers. 

 The highest inventory room contained approximately 4.2 kg of 30-year-old fuel-grade 

equivalent plutonium (FGE). All of this material was contained in waste drums. Overall, 

most rooms (20/26) contained less than 0.5 kg FGE. The safety basis limit for laboratory 

rooms is 20 kg FGE. 

 The largest vault inventory was 17.6 kg FGE. The reduced limit in the proposed safety basis 

is 175 kg FGE. Overall, the total building inventory is more than an order of magnitude less 

than the building limit of 700 kg FGE in the safety basis. 

 The contractor currently implements the material-at-risk (MAR) limits established in the 

Technical Safety Requirements at a transactional level. As a result, management is not 

actively provided summary information indicating the status of compliance with the various 

limits. Further, generating an aggregate summary of MAR status is complicated by 

differences in the systems used to track material for safeguards purposes and MAR limits. 

While knowledgeable workers can obtain this aggregate information with some effort, 

management may need to consider evaluating MAR control processes in the event the safety 

envelope is reduced in the future.