Criticality Safety At Los Alamos National Laboratory

Emergency response at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is handled through a graded approach depending on the specific emergency situation . LANL maintains a comprehensive capability to respond to events ranging from minor facility events (alerts) through major community events (general emergencies), including criticality accidents . Criticality safety and emergency response apply to all activities involving significant quantities of fissile material at LANL, primarily at Technical Area 18 (TA-18, the Los Alamos Critical Experiments Facility) and Technical Area 55 (TA-55, the Plutonium Facility). This discussion focuses on response to a criticality accident at TA-55; the approach at TA-18 is comparable.

The mission of the Criticality Safety Information Resource Center (CSIRC) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is the preservation of primary documentation supporting criticality safety. In many cases, but not all, this primary documentation consists of experimentalists' logbooks. Experience has shown that the logbooks and other primary information are vulnerable to being discarded. Destruction of these logbooks results in a permanent loss to the criticality safety community.

The Criticality Safety Information Resource Center (CSIRC) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a program jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in conjunction with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Recommendation 97-2. The goal of CSIRC is to preserve primary criticality safety documentation from U.S. critical experimental sites and to make this information available for the benefit of the technical community. Progress in archiving criticality safety primary documents at the LANL archives as well as efforts to make this information available to researchers are discussed. The CSIRC project has a natural linkage to the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP). This paper raises the possibility that the CSIRC project will evolve in a fashion similar to the ICSBEP. Exploring the implications of linking the CSIRC to the international criticality safety community is the motivation for this paper.