Description of An Upgrade Initiative to an Existing Nuclear Storage Vault for Storage of Plutonium Oxide

A processing group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) presented a storage challenge to a nuclear material storage facility at LANL. The processing group needed storage capacity for two metric tons of plutonium oxide. Appropriate storage and security concerns dictated this material must be located in an existing storage vault at the Plutonium Processing Facility at Technical Area-55 (TA-55). The existing condition of the vault presented several challenges to the accommodation of the storage request. Primarily, the vault is an active facility with dozens of people accessing it on a daily basis, also the vault is operating at near storage capacity. This paper will discuss these issues, as well other practical matters related to this endeavor, such as redesigning the existing storage configuration into an efficient, scaleable, user-friendly system, that addresses criticality concerns, dose, thermal and security issues, all while accommodating existing missions, limited budgets and day-to-day work schedules.