January 2016

Review of the Plutonium Facility Restart of Fissile Material Operations at the Los Alamos National Laboratory

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Safety and Environmental Assessments, within the independent Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA), conducted an independent review of the effectiveness of actions taken at the Plutonium Facility (PF-4) in Technical Area (TA)-55 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to correct significant weaknesses in the criticality safety and conduct-of-operations programs.  LANL is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS) under contract to the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration Los Alamos Field Office (NA-LA).  The LANS Laboratory Director directed a pause in fissile material operations on June 27, 2013, to address those weaknesses.  The EA review was performed concurrently with Federal readiness assessments of the Balance of Machining (June 22 to July 1, 2015) and Pit Flow Sheet (November 9 to 18, 2015) work activities supporting restarting these operations in PF-4.  EA also reviewed a sample of resumed work activities in PF-4 during these readiness assessments and during the week of October 26, 2015.