The head of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board told federal contractors Thursday her agency could approve a memorandum of understanding on its “rules of the road” with the Department of Energy as early as next month.
“We did have a great conversation with Deputy Secretary [David] Turk earlier this year and “it looks like mid-July at this point in time,” Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Chair Joyce Connery told the annual meeting of the Energy Facilities Contractors Group (EFCOG), conducted via Zoom.
The safety board and DOE have been “engaging staff to staff with the dept about kind of rules to the road … on access to information,” and these discussions started at the behest of Congress during the Donald Trump administration and continue during the Joe Biden administration, Connery said.
The process has been valuable to DNFSB as well as DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the Office of Environmental Management to “clarify and to make consistent how we are going to do business with each other,” Connery said in response to a question.
Connery said the safety board is a small agency, with roughly 100 employees, and can take action more swiftly than the two DOE entities that are much larger and “have their own sets of lawyers.”
The deal is taking a while to get done. The agencies hoped to formalize a mutual understanding months ago about how their respective personnel should interact at DOE sites under the controversial DOE Order 140.1. Critics said the order from 2018, approved by then-Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, placed too many restrictions on the safety board’s access to employees and records at defense-nuclear sites.
DNFSB and DOE began drafting various parts of the memorandum of understanding last fall.
DNFSB Maintained Inspections During COVID Peaks; Plans Increase in Site Inspectors
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the DNFSB said in a recently-published report to Congress it found ways to continue acting as a watchdog for defense-nuclear sites owned by the Department of Energy during fiscal year 2020.
Resident Inspectors continued to perform on-site safety oversight “within the DOE pandemic constraints at each site,” according to a June 1 report on the safety board’s performance during the fiscal year ended Sept. 31, 2020. The same report details its fiscal 2022 budget request for $31 million, level with the current year’s enacted budget..
“Most importantly, the agency made a seamless transition” to 100% telework during the last fiscal year without significant network downtime, according to the report. As of last week, the 100-plus DNFSB employees continued to telework. Travel by the five-member Washington, D.C.-based board itself was curtailed after January 2020 due to the pandemic.
DNFSB staff inspectors and engineers filed 97% of their expected weekly and monthly reports on DOE sites during fiscal 2020, according to the report.
As a result of the pandemic, the board’s Office of the Technical Director completed 46 of 104 reviews that were initially scheduled for fiscal 2020. The office “recognized that many of these reviews would continue into FY 2021,” DNFSB said in the report.
Meanwhile, during fiscal 2021, the DNFSB plans to implement a postponed plan to increase its resident Inspector staffing from 10 to 13 for the defense nuclear complex by increasing from two to three such inspectors at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The new hires were delayed largely due to the pandemic and, in addition, one resident inspector at the Pantex plant in Texas left the agency in March 2020, creating a fourth vacancy. All should be filled in fiscal 2021, DNFSB said.
