Authorization-basis management for the Advanced Recovery and Integrated Extraction System

One of the nation's most important goals entering the new millennium is to dismantle excess nuclear weapons and store plutonium safely and securely. A critical part of this effort is removing the plutonium from a nuclear weapon. The Advanced Recovery and Integrated Extraction System (ARIES) removes plutonium from the cores of nuclear weapons. A first-of-a-kind system, ARIES uses a dry process, thus minimizing the amount of waste generated during the process. The end product of ARIES is the declassification of weapons plutonium, packaged appropriately for long-term storage pending disposition. As such, ARIES increases the irreversibility of weapons plutonium by placing material into a form suitable for international inspection. ARIES integrates technology developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for demonstration at the LANL, Technical Area 55 (TA-55) Plutonium Facility. This multi-million-dollar demonstration project included the design and installation of glove boxes, material transport, material conversion processes, material packaging, electrolytic decontamination, and nondestructive analysis. An integrated system of six modules, the system dismantles, reduces, and processes weapons components with minimal additions to the nuclear waste stream. The modules associated with ARIES are based on individual operations, which were included in the authorization basis for the TA-55 Plutonium Facility. The combination of the individual operations into an integrated system of six modules necessitated additional hazard analysis. Each of the modules was the subject of module-specific process hazards analysis (PrHA). The hazard analysis approach provided stand-alone documentation of the safety envelope of each individual module, as well as the larger safety envelope of the integrated operation of those modules in material processing. This approach facilitated the DOE review by providing detailed description of both individual module and integrated operational hazards and the appropriate controls allowing independent confirmatory analysis. The approach was further aided by the developmental stages of the individual modules. Because they were based on individual operations at TA-55, several design changes with respect to safety were incorporated in the ARIES generation of these modules. These factors, together with open interaction between facility and DOE personnel allowed the authorization-basis approval of ARIES as a final safety analysis report supplement to the TA-55 authorization basis without an unreviewed safety question determination