Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Express Concerns about Return to H-Canyon Operations at SRS — October 23, 2015 weekly report (posted November 24, 2015) and linked here
Is Restart and Operation of the HB-Line – to Produce Unneeded Plutonium Oxide for the Failed MOX Program – SAFE?
“While many instances of procedural improvements and opportunities for improving conduct of operations have been identified, the site reps have mixed feelings about the overall effort. The all-encompassing scope included some low value actions (e.g., stopping office trash pickup or repair of copy machines, deliberate operations for general counsel). Managers across the site are spending many hours in management review team meetings reviewing hundreds of management field observations or MFOs (e.g., HB-Line stated they have a backlog of 200 MFOs) of mostly low hazard activities. These MFOs are creating a huge wave of procedure change requests (PCR). For example, H-Canyon reports that they need to revise at least 500 procedures. Considering how few procedure writers are at SRS and how inadequate procedure validation has been a common problem in past events, trying to push this many changes through the system may be setting up future procedure quality issues. Addressing the lessons learned from the HB-Line RCA is a key corrective action, but the reality is that even after interviewing the workers involved in the event, nobody really knows how/why the group made certain decisions so some of the RCA is likely to be speculative. Suspending processes for weeks or months without using the down time to train, practice, and drill the workers may result in a loss of proficiency and equipment issues often occur when they are restarted after sitting idle. For example, HB-Line had just qualified four rotating shift crews on plutonium operations, but they had little opportunity to conduct any actual processing before the pause took effect.”
[RCA = root cause analysis]
DNFSB weekly report of October 23, 2015 linked here
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HB-Line goes back into “deliberate operations” – November 23, 2015
- see SRS update linked here
SRS has notified the public that HB-Line, which had an incident during production of plutonium oxide for the failed MOX project, has been brought back into operation. Given two criticality related incidents this year in the facility, all eyes will be on operations. HB-Line is slated to produced 3.7 metric tons of plutonium oxide but has so far produced only 9.6 kilograms, or only 0.3% of its production mission.
See SRS Watch’s November 12, 2015 report
”H-Canyon Folly, Plutonium Failure,”on HB-Line problems and no need for it to operate to produce plutonium oxide “feed stock” for the MOX boondoggle, which has been kept on a shutdown track by Congress (as its funding level – $345 million/year – is barely enough to keep it alive).