As part of what it has dubbed a good-faith effort to better cooperate with the federal government’s independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this month delivered an updated plan for implementing safety recommendations for the Pantex Plant in Texas.
Whether the changes will convince the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) that the Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency is now accepting Recommendation 2019-1 in deed as well as in word remains to be seen.
As of Wednesday, the DNFSB was “still evaluating the implementation plan” submitted on June 5, a board spokesperson said by email. The board drafted its recommendation in 2018 and formally issued it in 2019.
In August 2019, the DNFSB said that while the National Nuclear Security Administration had purported to accept recommendations about tooling, falling-technician, and lightning hazards at the nation’s nuclear-weapon service center, the agency’s initial plan for implementing the recommendations amounted to a de-facto rejection. The first iteration of the plan left the board wondering “what specific actions the Department will take to address the recommendation,” DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton wrote in a letter that month to then-Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.
Recent revisions by the NNSA aim to provide those details. For example, multiple times in the revised implementation plan, the NNSA pointed to a review Pantex completed in March as evidence that the plant complied, and intends to comply, with the DNFSB’s recommendations about falling technicians and tooling hazards. In the review, Pantex personnel looked for shortcomings in all 16 of Pantex’s documented safety analyses, which attempt to foresee and mitigate operational hazards.
In Recommendation 2019-1, the DNFSB said Pantex should assess, among other things: the potential for a worker to crush parts of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb by tripping and falling on a certain piece of equipment; cracks in a tool used to lift high explosives out of W-76 warheads; and procedures that may expose the W-87’s warhead’s arming system to jostling during disassembly.
In particular, the NNSA agreed to designate a central technical authority for falling technician scenarios, according to the revised plan. Pantex planned to draft a memo about the matter in June, and intends by March 2021 to “revise administrative controls associated with Falling Man scenarios to ensure they are compliant” with the 2016 DOE standard the prescribes how such administrative controls — essentially, rules of conduct that seek to promote compliance with legal regulations — must be written. That is according to NNSA’s revised implementation plan.
