Year
2002
Abstract
To support any future stockpile, the United States government must reestablish the capability to fabricate sufficient quantities of nuclear weapon components. The initial phase of the effort focuses on examining the operations required for a “Modern Pit Facility.” Post-September 11’th security considerations dictate that facility designers include the “attractiveness” of the facility to terrorist attack when making technology and layout decisions. To address this issue, considerations of the form, quantity and location of materials as a function of time in addition to more traditional capacity and throughput goals are required to characterize potential facility options. The Technology Modeling and Analysis Group (D-7) at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a 2-D, time-dependent tool for visualization of operations at a potential Modern Pit Facility. Past activities within the group developed a discrete event system for simulating the detailed material-balance behaviors of nuclear material processing activities. The Process Modeling System, ProMoS, simulates all processing activities and enforces a mass and material balance at every step. The existing capability thus generates all the necessary material form, amount and location data. The latest efforts couple the ProMoS simulation engine to a back-end visualization tool, PROOF®. The resultant capability allows dynamic evaluation of material quantities and forms in a geometrically accurate representation. This capability helps ascertain the relative safety and security benefits of various proposed facility layouts and processing schemes in addition to capacity and throughput considerations. D-7 has utilized the above capability to analyze a few layout and processing technology choices available for the proposed Modern Pit Facility. The analyses demonstrate the pros and cons of various individual choices within an integrated system. Accurate geometric representation facilitates assessing the security requirements resulting from emergent “attractiveness” hotspots. The layouts and processing schemes analyzed represent conjectures by the authors and are not intended to present any particular design approach for the proposed Modern Pit Facility.