Plutonium Disposition and Storage Model

The Savannah River Site (SRS) deals with dispositioning a substantial quantity of the nation’s plutonium. An effort was initiated over a decade ago to model plutonium processing and storage to present to Congress and the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board an optimum option for plutonium management in the Nuclear Weapons Complex.

Along with efforts to develop information using spreadsheets, a plutonium disposition and storage model was developed using Extend. ExtendSim was chosen for this task because its hierarchical nature allowed development of a modular model which was easy to explain and understand. The power of the discrete event modeling approach was observed when adding shipping and process schedule logic, determining bottlenecks in the process, and making rapid changes to the model to assess the impact of different decisions.