Los Alamos Women in Science
Northern Chapter of the New Mexico Network for
Women in Science and Engineering
LUNCHTIME TALK SERIES
 
Thursday, Feb 17, 2000
11:30 am - 1:30 pm, Otowi cafeteria side room C, LANL

TALK at 12:00:
Barbara D. Henderson, D.Min., ESH-6, Nuclear Criticality Safety, LANL
"The Criticality Safety Information Resource Center
at Los Alamos National Laboratory"

ABSTRACT
We in ESH-6 house and operate the Criticality Safety Information Resource Center (CSIRC) at LANL. The mission of CSIRC is to preserve primary criticality safety documentation from throughout the DOE complex, to locate this information centrally at LANL, and to make the information available to researchers in the field of criticality safety. To achieve this goal, we have scanned primary material from Brookhaven, Hanford, Rocky Flats, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge, and are in the process of putting the scanned material up on our website. We have also used this collected material to identify unreported critical experiment descriptions that may be of benchmark quality and become part of the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project.

Another goal of CSIRC is to videotape the still living early pioneers in criticality safety talking about the early days of criticality safety and actually reviewing and commenting on some of their early logbooks and experiments.

We are interested in sharing this information because we hope that the success of the CSIRC project will encourage other groups, disciplines, and countries to archive primary data of their own. (CSIRC relates peripherally to the NWAP project, but receives no NWAP funding.)

As a corollary to the CSIRC project, we in ESH-6 are in the process of publishing what we expect to be the definitive report on criticality accidents. This report will be a revisitation of document DOE/NCT-04, which reported on U.S. and U.K. criticality accidents. The breakthrough in this report is that we will be reporting accident descriptions of the Russian criticality accidents, which have never before been reported on in a document of this kind. We are delaying publication of this document so that we may include at least a preliminary description of the recent Japanese criticality accident. (As you may know, our group leader, Tom McLaughlin, was part of the 3-person U.S. delegation which recently visited the site of the Japanese accident.)

Nonmembers Welcome!  

Sideroom C is reserved from 11:30 to 1:30 for people who like to eat earlier or later, and informal discussion. You are welcome to come for just the talk at noon, and questions are encouraged!

For driving directions to Otowi Cafeteria (TA-3, building 261) at LANL, see: http://www.lanl.gov/tools/maps
(direct link to map showing the Otowi Building: http://nis-www.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/wthi?ta=3&bldg=261).

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