A federal safety watchdog will hear testimony from government agencies next month on best practices for taking care of aging nuclear infrastructure, some of which is a half-century old.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has set a public hearing Aug.14 at its Washington, headquarters to hear testimony from representatives of the Government Accountability Office, the American Nuclear Society, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
That is according to the press release from the board.
The current agenda for the August hearing lists no representatives of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management or the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). In a June letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, DNFSB said it wants to hold a joint workshop on the issue with DOE on Sept. 10.
While DOE has made progress on blunting the “age-related degradation” of nuclear safety facilities, more is needed, DNFSB Chair Joyce Connery said in the letter to Granholm.
DOE told DNFSB in April it is doing a “deep dive” into how best to preserve and shore up old infrastructure.
At DNFSB’s request, NNSA and Environmental Management published a joint benchmark review for infrastructure management in September 2023. The nuclear cleanup office reported many of its facilities are 50-to-70 years old and NNSA said in the review it has 167 “nuclear hazardous facilities” and only 53, less than a third, were less than 40 years old. Fifty of NNSA’s facilities were more than 61 years old.
