Critical experiment accidents - Redux - 6-14

Much has been written regarding 'process accidents' in the realm of criticality safety. Indeed, great effort has been put toward analyzing the accidents for lesson-learned and toward the development of models to predict the behavior of process systems in support of safety cases an emergency response. Less effort has been levied toward the lessons-learned and modeling of critical experiment accidents. Perhaps this stems from the tenets of criticality safety: Fissionable material processes shall be determined to be subcritical under both normal and credible abnormal conditions. Given the imminent startup of the Criticality Experiments Facility (CEF) at the Nevada National Security Site, an examination of critical experiment accidents for lessons-learned is prudent to ensure that the benefits of past experience is applied to CEF operations. In this paper, the history of critical experiment accidents is reviewed and lessons-learned relevant to CEF are discussed. The evaluation of the 15 criticality accidents reviewed in the article takes the following format: accident description, factors contributing to the accident and controls pertinent to each contributing factor