Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board 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 Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB) 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, most of 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 COVID-19 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, a public hearing that DNFSB initially expected to hold at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina in March 2020 has been pushed back into 2021 due to the pandemic.
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.
