The Criticality Safety Information Resource Center Csirc At Los Alamos National Laboratory

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.

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.

Since August of 1994, the Los Alamos National Laboratory has been using the LANL Categorization Criteria Matrix for determining the need for and level of reporting criticality safety limit violations. The LANL Categorization Criteria Matrix is DOE approved, and is cited in a DOE approved SAR for the LANL Plutonium Facility as the method used to determine whether a criticality limit violation is reportable to DOE via 5000.3B ''Occurrence Categorization, notification and Reporting Requirements'' (replaced by DOE O 232.1). The use of the LANL Categorization Criteria Matrix provides a framework that allows criticality limit violations to be objectively reviewed in terms of what were the consequences of the criticality safety limit violation. Using the LANL Categorization Criteria Matrix helps the criticality safety engineer and line supervision explain to others, in a quantifiable manner, the significance of the criticality limit violation, the levels of margin of safety built into operations, and demonstrate the difference between evaluated conditions and working conditions.

The stages through which criticality safety has progressed are reviewed and speculation about present signs of maturity is made. Early history, evolution, and accident experiences are described. It is concluded that criticality safety as a discipline is mature.

This paper will discuss some basic technical information resources that would be helpful to the novice nuclear criticality safety specialist. These include bibliographic and benchmark compilations, handbooks, and online resources. The specialist should also be familiar with benchmark quality experimental data needed for code validation. This paper will also discuss the critical experiment data obtained in the 1950s and 1960s at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

This is a glossary of terms generally encountered in the literature of nuclear criticality and criticality safety. Terms sometimes misused are emphasized. 7 refs.