It has been more than a year now since the Department of Energy ordered stricter limits on communications with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), but the independent federal nuclear health-and-safety watchdog has mostly not cataloged the stonewalling connected with Order 140.1.
Chairman Bruce Hamilton, in an April hearing before a House Armed Services panel, succinctly reduced the board’s gripe with the 2018 DOE order: it is “allowing the department to determine where we look.”
Yet the DNFSB has for the most part not aired specific articles of dirty laundry, limiting its public grumblings to hypothetical scenarios and offering legal counterarguments to DOE’s decision.
Recently, however, the board did make one detailed denial-of-access complaint.
In a June 12 letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Hamilton said the department had barred board inspectors from meetings of DOE elders conducting nuclear explosive safety studies.
The Energy Department has locked the board out of nuclear explosive safety proceedings since March 2018, Hamilton wrote. The studies, conducted by DOE subject matter experts and concluded without much formal documentation, are precursors to assembling or disassembling nuclear weapons at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
The studies examine the procedures, people, and equipment involved with putting together or taking apart a nuclear weapon and aim to identify and prevent shortcomings in those areas that could lead to an unintentional nuclear explosion.
“Without access to all phases of the [Nuclear Explosive Safety] study process, we are unable to assess DOE’s implementation of its directives governing safe nuclear explosive operations,” Hamilton wrote.
Hamilton said that DNFSB staff was briefed about the safety meetings after the fact by participants, but that these briefings are not a satisfactory substitute for actually attending the meetings.
The DNFSB chief asked Perry to tell him, by mid-July, whether DOE had formally determined that it would forbid the defense board the access it seeks to these studies.
“Thus far no response has been received,” a DNFSB spokesperson wrote Wednesday in an email.
The Atomic Energy Act empowers the DNFSB to protect the public from the hazards of active and former defense nuclear sites, except those controlled by DOE’s naval reactors program. The DNFSB says it needs access to all Energy Department facilities and workers to do that.
The department says the DNFSB doesn’t, and that the board does not need to look in Category 3 facilities or radiological facilities: buildings where personnel handle radioactive material, but which in the larger agency’s opinion pose no conceivable hazard to people or property outside the building.
The DNFSB is a roughly $30-million-a-year federal agency that makes health-and-safety recommendations for DOE defense-nuclear sites. The agency does not regulate the department, which regulates its own nuclear programs, but the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree with the board’s safety recommendations.
The DNFSB has two resident inspectors on-site at Pantex.
Also as part of Order 140.1, issued in May 2018, DOE employees and contractors may not speak with DNFSB personnel unless the department signs off on the interaction.
Meanwhile, the Senate is interested in a more detailed accounting of what DNFSB member Joyce Connery has called “140.1 roadblocks.”
In the upper chamber’s 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office to study whether and how Order 140.1 is affecting the DNFSB’s ability to protect the public from the hazards of nuclear weapons work at DOE sites.
At this point, however, the directive is only a wish-list item, tucked into a bill report for legislation that has yet to be reconciled with a competing defense authorization act the House of Representatives will not vote on until next week, at the earliest.
