In his farewell memo last week, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board Chairman Sean Sullivan suggested he lost the confidence of the 120 staff members of the independent safety watchdog he led for a year and wanted to disband.
“Our fine staff deserves to be led by an executive the staff believes in,” Sullivan, a board member since August 2012, wrote in a memo to staff circulated by email on Jan. 19. NS&D Monitor acquired the text of the memo. He said board Vice Chairman Bruce Hamilton, who will take over as chairman, “will be that executive” upon Sullivan’s formal resignation on Feb. 2.
A board spokesperson in Washington, D.C., confirmed Monday the text is authentic.
The DNFSB is an independent federal health and safety watchdog for Department of Energy defense nuclear sites, including active weapons facilties and Cold War nuclear-cleanup sites. The agency has no regulatory power, but can make safety recommendations with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree.
Sullivan has usually preferred a light touch, or no touch at all, when it comes to the DNFSB’s oversight role. When he became chairman, Sullivan took that idea to the extreme and told the White House it should ask Congress dissolve the board entirely, or fold it in a reduced scope into the Energy Department.
Congress, which created the DNFSB in the first place, has effectively shot down that proposal. Lawmakers last year authorized the board to continue at roughly its usual annual funding of $30 million as part of the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.
Sullivan’s farewell memo is not the first place he has discussed a lack of confidence in DNFSB leadership. The outgoing chairman cited that very problem as a motivation behind his December decision to install Katherine Herrera — a lawyer who was previously the board’s assistant general manager — as the DNFSB deputy technical director. In that position, Herrera helps manage about two-thirds of the DNFSB’s workforce.
Sullivan’s hands-off approach sometimes set him at odds with his four fellow board members.
Last April, for example, Sullivan stood alone against the rest of the board when he voted not to send a letter to the Energy Department and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration highlighting the limited safety margin in the design for the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee. Bechtel National is building that next-generation uranium facility.
“There is no safety issue with the design of the Uranium Processing Facility,” Sullivan wrote in his one-sentence dissent, with which not even Hamilton, the board’s only other Republican, concurred.
By law, the DNFSB may have no more than three members affiliated with the same political party.
Sullivan also dug his heels in, again without Hamilton’s help, in a December vote to keep open a recommendation about the safety culture at the Waste Treatment Plant: a facility being built to treat up to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
