By early next year, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and the Department of Energy could sign a memorandum of understanding about how to share information under a two year-old DOE order that limits interactions between the federal agencies.
On Tuesday, the board — a roughly $30-million-a-year agency with a staff of around 100 full-timers — announced that it and the DOE agreed to form an interagency working group that could produce a memorandum of understanding for approval by the leadership of both agencies by Feb. 26, 2021. That is according to the working group charter the board posted online Tuesday.
Since March, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has been asking DOE to sit down and negotiate such an agreement about the controversial Order 140.1, which the $30-billion-a-year nuclear-weapons-and-waste agency handed down in May 2018.
The office of the DOE associate under secretary for environment, health, safety and security, currently Matthew Moury, and the office of the DNFSB technical director, currently Chris Roscetti, will lead the negotiations, according to the working group charter.
DNFSB writes safety recommendations about active and shuttered DOE defense-nuclear sites. DOE must publicly agree or disagree with these recommendations, which may touch on any defense-nuclear site except for naval reactors sites. In 2019, for the first time in the board’s roughly 30-year history, DOE rejected a DNFSB recommendation.
DNFSB’s weekly DOE site reports are among the only — and certainly the most regularly published — independent, expert reviews the federal government produces about DOE defense-nuclear operations.
Because Congress made it do so, DOE this summer softened some of Order 140.1’s requirements. The agency deleted a requirement that its contractors and civil servants get headquarters approval before responding to questions from DNFSB inspectors, and added congressionally mandated language directing DOE personnel to give the board “prompt and unfettered” access to nuclear-weapons sites.
However, the rewritten order still allows the secretary of energy to determine whether a board staffer “does not need such access” to do her or his job.
DNFSB has said the rewritten order addresses concerns that DOE was ignoring the board’s legal authority to inspect weapons sites, but the watchdog says only a memorandum of understanding can give the two agencies a blueprint for how to interact on a day-to-day basis.
