Year
2003
Abstract
ABSTRACT Nuclear materials planning at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Plutonium Facility at Technical Area 55 has become increasingly important, in lieu of the fact that storage capacity in the existing vault is so limited. A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet “model” was created to aid in forecasting of nuclear material inventory, as well as vault space availability. The Nuclear Materials Planning (NMP) Spreadsheet currently encompasses material used in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Defense Plan activities. The spreadsheet allows the user to input current inventories for the facility and the vault and based on processing, process efficiency, predicted processes activity per quarter and shipments and receipts, predicts vault and facility inventory for each quarter of the next four fiscal years. The vault can accommodate containers of various sizes. However, a main concern is the availability of large spaces in the vault. These locations are commonly used for pit storage, but can provide storage to other large items that cannot fit in small spaces. The spreadsheet predicts when the large spaces will be filled up with pits and hemishells. In the previous revision, the spreadsheet only considers one material type, plutonium. The oralloy (OY) decontamination process, which removes plutonium contamination from HEU metal, was added to the spreadsheet. Another consideration is the impact of direct discard of items out of the vault. Sixteen items per week will be removed from the vault. In order to test the forecasting ability of the spreadsheet, inventories for the facility were used to determine input for the spreadsheet. Inventory information for the last quarter of fiscal year (FY) 2002 and the first quarter of FY 2003 were input into the spreadsheet and, in turn, predictions for inventory for the second quarter of 2003 were produced. These values, when compared to the actual inventory values at the end of the second quarter of FY 2003, showed agreement.