WASHINGTON — The federal government’s independent watchdog for defense nuclear sites backed off a formal safety recommendation to the Energy Department here Tuesday, citing a lack of confidence that the measure would better prepare DOE facilities for emergencies.
In an open meeting at its headquarters, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) voted 4-1 to close a recommendation it made to DOE in 2014 to assess and improve what the board calls “emergency preparedness and response” at 10 DOE sites. Board member Joyce Connery voted “no.”
No DOE officials attended Tuesday’s meeting. Several were invited in July when the DNFSB announced it would discuss the recommendation publicly. Among them were Energy Secretary Rick Perry and National Nuclear Security Administration chief Frank Klotz.
Sean Sullivan, who President Donald Trump appointed chairman of the DNFSB in January, said Perry was “unable to attend” Tuesday. Sullivan also said the board hesitated to brief Klotz because the Obama administration appointee could soon be replaced by a Trump nominee.
“So we had that aspect of a team that’s not in place,” Sullivan said.
The DNFSB made the recommendation in the wake of the 2011 reactor meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the 2014 radiation leak at DOE’s underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
In response to the recommendation, then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told DNFSB that his agency would create new headquarters-authored procedures and drills intended to homogenize and sharpen emergency preparedness across the nuclear complex.
Some of the that work has been completed, a DNFSB engineer testified Tuesday, and another update is due from DOE in December: more than a year after the board first asked the agency to wrap up its reply to the recommendation.
But none of those actions on DOE’s part “are likely to improve implementation of the emergency preparedness and response at defense nuclear facilities,” DNFSB engineer Christopher Roscetti told the board. “There’s nothing [in the recommendation] that actually holds the sites accountable to actually improve their implementation.”
The board subsequently decided to close out the recommendation to DOE and go back to the drawing board on emergency preparedness and response. There was, however, some disagreement Tuesday about what tack to take now that the board has cut bait on the 2014 recommendation.
DNFSB Chairman Sean Sullivan, appointed to lead the board in January by President Donald Trump, said he doubted any recommendation to make sweeping changes across the entire defense-nuclear complex would ever bear fruit.
“This sort of recommendation, where we ask the secretary to change things broadly throughout the complex, is just problematic,” Sullivan said during the meeting. He argued that the DNFSB might have more success if it pointed out specific examples of deficient emergency response capabilities at defense nuclear sites.
Connery, Sullivan’s predecessor as DNFSB chair, disagreed.
“We could issue a recommendation a week at sites specifics and play whack-a-mole … at each site with each of their specific issues, but this is a structural challenge that I think the department’s facing, and it’s incumbent upon us to point it out to the department,” Connery said.
By the end of the meeting, the board agreed to send Perry a letter notifying him of the DNFSB’s decision to close the recommendation, and inviting him to continue his predecessor’s dialogue with the board about emergency preparedness.
