DNFSB delivers weapons complex safety roundup for EnergySec Wright

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board recently welcomed Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to the weapons complex with a summary of safety issues including waste drums and transportation.

“On behalf of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), I extend our warmest congratulations and welcome you to this pivotal role,” DNFSB Acting Chair Thomas Summers said in the Feb. 13 letter to Wright. Wright was confirmed by the Senate Feb. 3 to head the Department of Energy.

While it lacks regulatory power, the DNFSB was created by Congress to provide outside safety advice to DOE for its nuclear facilities. Here are issues touched upon in the board’s letter:

At the Pantex plant in Texas, DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has fixed some safety concerns about operations with nuclear weapons, but still has others remaining, according to DNFSB.  

In the letter, DNFSB lists concerns about safety at new and old facilities at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina.

The SRS Tritium Facilities, which supply tritium to maintain the nuclear deterrent, have gaps that need to be better addressed, DNFSB said. This includes the lack of “adequate safety controls to prevent or mitigate certain accident scenarios that could result in high radiological dose consequences to workers.”

At the SRS Plutonium Processing Facility, the board said “project personnel incorrectly assumed facility workers could use their senses to detect radiological accidents such as glovebox spills or fire and then exit the area to protect themselves.” Safety alarms should also be relied upon to alert workers, DNFSB said.

The board is “encouraged” by an October DOE plan to improve transportation safety at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Summers said. DNFSB identified significant concerns with Los Alamos transport safety in January 2024, the chair said. “The safety issues were particularly concerning given the high radioactive material at-risk, the proximity of the onsite transportation routes to the public, and the nature of several credible accident scenarios.”

Over the past 11 years, there have been two major accidents where drums of radioactive waste ruptured, Summers said. One occurred in 2014 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and another in 2018 at the Idaho National Laboratory.