NNSA’s small, but mighty Environment, Safety, and Health program advances the Defense Programs shipping corridor

A successful multi-site collaboration led by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Environment, Safety, and Health (ESH) will help streamline urgent national security missions. After 10+ years of effort, ESH unveiled its newly certified packaging for shipping stockpile pits and subcritical experiments. 

“This is the culmination of an enterprise-wide effort,” said Matthew Weber, Program Manager for the ESH Packaging Program.

The new Defense Programs Package (DPP)-1 container was designed to replace a highly specialized and aging container called the Model-FL, which was originally used to ship Cold War-era pits between NNSA sites. 

The new DPP-1 provides a level of adaptability that will improve shipping efficiency, safety, and cost. 

However, the most unique feature of the DPP-1 container is the weapons-specific testing it underwent. This series of tests was in addition to the normal regulatory testing in which safety of the environment, public, and workers is ensured. Rather, the weapons-specific testing generated data for the weapons design agencies and production agencies, including Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Savannah River Site. 

The DPP-1 design was not complete until all stakeholders, including the weapons design agencies, were certain that the container met all current and future regulations and could deliver these materials across the enterprise with quality, performance, and integrity. 

The thought process for the DPP-1 went beyond today’s concept and focused on a container that would accommodate future content as well as future regulations. 

“Multi-use containers like the DPP-1 make packaging and shipping more streamlined for NNSA’s Office of Defense Programs as they move products from weapons designers and weapons testers to the location in which the final weapon is built,” said Weber. 

Streamlining was a slow and steady process based upon phase gating—an approach to achieve cost savings by strengthening project management across contractor support activities, reducing the number of certified packages with similar contents, developing general purpose packaging to provide more flexibility in shipping new contents, and facilitating quick responses to requirements assigned an elevated level of urgency. The DPP-1 container fits these criteria.

“The development process for this new packaging required commitment to communication and collaboration between ESH and all the various stakeholders, including NNSA’s Office of Defense Programs, the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex, LANL, LLNL, and the other M&O contractors,” said Weber.

The project embodies a decade’s worth of work, and the final result will enable a more urgent response to the stockpile modernization effort.