Year
1964
Abstract
It is the purpose of my talk to describe how good nuclear materials management complements and helps assure safety by telling you about some of the safety problems we face in the operation of the AEC's Rocky Flats Plant and how the nuclear materials management program in effect there makes our job of safety easier. A few comments are in order concerning the term nuclear materials management. From the standpoint of our Manager, who is responsible for the proper management of several billion dollars worth of nuclear materials, materials management means many things. It means the effective use of methods, procedures, and techniques for recording, reporting, analyzing, evaluating, adjusting, and regulating nuclear materials inventories to assure maximum efficiency and economy consistent with established national policies and goals. More specifically, nuclear materials management includes acquisition, use, and disposal of materials so as to effect maximum economies in materials utilization and to minimize consumption and losses; development and maintenance of quantity data for cost and financial control, production control, or health and safety; establishment of internal controls to guard against carelessness, theft, and misappropriation and to assure compliance with managerial policy; determination of economic inventory levels and reorder quantities consistent with program requirements; and, determination of the economics of current recovery of scrap vis-a-vis storage for future recovery or discard. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Albuquerque Operations and what it does, we have the responsibility for research, development, production, storage and disposal of atomic weapons. We receive a large share of the materials produced by the Savannah River, Hanford and Oak Ridge production plants, and fabricate the material into weapons parts at our Rocky Flats Plant. The parts are then sent to our weapon assembly plants. We have, of coxirse, other activities in addition to the weapons program which use nuclear materials. The Rover program carried out by Los Alamos at Los Alamos and Nevada uses large quantities of enriched uranium. Modest reactor development programs and active critical assembly facilities add an additional substantial requirement for nuclear materials in Albuquerque Operations programs. These increase and complicate the Nuclear Materials Management job. When one considers that our fissile material inventory may exceed several tons, one can appreciate the scope of the nuclear materials management job.