The U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) still suffers from flagging morale and could stand to improve communication between its staff and its politically appointed leadership, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s inspector general wrote in an annual report on the board’s biggest challenges.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s inspector general, which also serves that role for the DNFSB, “continues to see management of a healthy and sustainable organizational culture and climate [at the DNFSB] as a serious challenge,” according to last week’s report.
Although it did not quantify the churn, the inspector general said the DNFSB had been hurt by turnover among the technical staffers tasked with protecting the public from health hazards at Department of Energy nuclear sites.
Also, the inspector general said, communications between board members and technical staff sometimes get bogged down by inefficiencies in the DNFSB’s Issue and Commitment Tracking System: an online workflow tool that agency leadership and technical staffers use to keep track of specific oversight activities.
In addition, the inspector general worried that the DNFSB’s technical staff, including resident inspectors at DOE nuclear sites, might not be able to “operate efficiently and effectively” because the board has too few staffers handling administrative functions at headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Technical staff, trained in nuclear safety and operations, make up around 80 percent of the DNFSB’s headcount. Among these are DNFSB field inspectors who live and work near current and former defense-nuclear sites.
The inspector general said the DNFSB could also improve its financial record keeping and its ability to recruit and retain needed personnel, and better train its existing employees.
According to the inspector general’s report, the DNFSB has 89 staffers now. In late September, the agency approved a 2020 staffing plan that would take it up 115 employees: a little higher than where the headcount was expected to settle after the board last year approved a plan — since blocked by Congress — to reorganize its bureaucracy and hold staffing at the equivalent of about 100 full-timers.
Congress created the DNFSB in 1988 to identify hazards at DOE nuclear-weapon sites, current and former, that might threaten public health.
Under federal law, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector general must report annually on what it deems to be the DNFSB’s most serious management and performance challenges. The report sums up other inspector general reports about the board.
The DNFSB has no regulatory authority over the Energy Department, which is its own nuclear regulator, but it may make safety recommendations with which the Secretary of Energy must publicly agree or disagree. The board has made two safety recommendations during the Donald Trump administration. In a first, DOE rejected one of them: a recommendation to improve emergency response and other capabilities at the Savannah River Site’s tritium facilities in Aiken, S.C.
