Use of hazard assessments to achieve risk reduction in the USDOE Stockpile Stewardship (SS-21) Program
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Odgen Environmental and Energy Services, Albuquerque, NM (United States)
This paper summarizes the nuclear explosive hazard assessment activities performed to support US Department of Energy (DOE) Stockpile Stewardship Demonstration Project SS-21, better known as the ``Seamless Safety`` program. Past practice within the DOE Complex has dictated the use of a significant number of post-design/fabrication safety reviews to analyze the safety associated with operations on nuclear explosives and to answer safety questions. These practices have focused on reviewing-in or auditing-in safety vs incorporating safety in the design process. SS-21 was proposed by the DOE as an avenue to develop a program to ``integrate established, recognized, verifiable safety criteria into the process at the design stage rather than continuing the reliance on reviews, evaluations and audits.`` The entire Seamless Safety design and development process is verified by a concurrent hazard assessment (HA). The primary purpose of the SS-21 Demonstration Project HA was to demonstrate the feasibility of performing concurrent HAs as part of an engineering design and development effort and then to evaluate the use of the HA to provide an indication in the risk reduction or gain in safety achieved. To accomplish this objective, HAs were performed on both baseline (i.e., old) and new (i.e. SS-21) B61-0 Center Case Section disassembly processes. These HAs were used to support the identification and documentation of weapon- and process-specific hazards and safety-critical operating steps. Both HAs focused on identifying accidents that had the potential for worker injury, public health effects, facility damage, toxic gas release, and dispersal of radioactive materials. A comparison of the baseline and SS-21 process risks provided a semi-quantitative estimate of the risk reduction gained via the Seamless Safety process.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 100099
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-95-1670; CONF-951135-7; ON: DE95014008; IN: TSA-11-95-R120
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 1995 International mechanical engineering congress and exhibition, San Francisco, CA (United States), 12-17 Nov 1995; Other Information: PBD: [1995]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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