Material Consolidation at Luch: Lessons Learned

A program of nuclear materials (NM) consolidation at Luch was initiated in 1992. The effort was complicated by the variety of NM accumulated during forty-five years of activity and by the large number of locations where materials were stored. Recently, Luch consolidated NM at Luch from twenty-eight separate locations into three processing buildings and the Central Storage Facility (CSF). The CSF now has a modern physical protection system based on building modifications, electronic access control, remote video monitoring, and a variety of sensors and alarms. The Luch SCF can be easily modified to provide additional space for storing NM from other nuclear facilities in the Moscow region. Challenges remain as Luch moves toward implementation of computerized NM accounting. Luch is heavily involved in highly enriched uranium (HEU) scrap recovery as a service to other nuclear facilities. HEU scrap is shipped to Luch in a wide variety of mechanical forms, compounds, and alloys, making quantitative measurement of receipts difficult. Luch is taking steps to stratify its material inventory, so that advanced destructive assay (DA) and nondestructive assay (NDA) techniques and instruments provided by the US can be used to measure materials for shipments and receipts, internal transfers, and physical inventory taking.