In an escalation of an ongoing turf war, the federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said last week it would send personnel to the Department of Energy’s secretive nuclear explosive safety study meetings, despite that agency’s position that it should not.
“We have directed our staff to attend all phases of the NES [nuclear explosive safety] study process,” DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton wrote in an Oct. 11 letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
In the letter, published online recently by the DNFSB, Hamilton rebuffed National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) boss Lisa Gordon-Hagerty’s Aug. 9 offer to brief board staff about Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group meetings after they happen.
As he did in a June letter to DOE, penned after the board first broke the news that the NNSA had denied DNFSB inspectors access to such meetings at the Pantex Plant in Texas, Hamilton said these after-the-fact briefings are “insufficient substitutes” for actually observing the sessions — something the DNFSB says it is empowered to do under federal law.
“[I]ndependent analysis is not possible if our staff only has access to the reiterations of others’ characterization of activities,” Hamilton wrote. “Should you wish to prohibit access to a particular study, we respectfully request written communication to the board.”
Nuclear explosive safety studies led by the Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group are gatherings of technical experts, including federal staff from the three Energy Department nuclear weapons laboratories, the Pantex weapons assembly and disassembly plant, and the Nevada National Security Site. Also represented are the prime contractors for Pantex and the Nevada National Security Site, as well as officials from NNSA headquarters in Washington.
Whenever a nuclear weapon has to be serviced, the Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group vets the service procedure, which the lab responsible for the weapon provides.
In its June letter to Perry, the DNFSB said it has been denied access to nuclear explosive safety study deliberations — candid rounds of debate between group members carried out after the presentation of technical facts — since March 2018.
The DNFSB does not regulate the Energy Department, which is its own regulator at current and former defense nuclear sites, but the board may may safety recommendations with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree. The agencies have been feuding over DOE’s Order 140.1 from May 2018, which prohibits the department’s employees and contractors from speaking with DNFSB staff unless DOE signs off on the interaction.
That has frustrated the DNFSB, which has called for unfettered access, citing the 1988 law that, in the board’s reading, gives it — not DOE — the right to determine what information it needs to carry out its lawful mission of protecting the public from potential hazards at nuclear-weapon sites.
At deadline Friday, a DNFSB spokesperson said that board staff had not attended any deliberations of the Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group deliberations since Hamilton mailed his letter, and that DOE had not specifically asked the board to stay away.
