The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is after the Energy Department for a long-overdue update on the agency’s plan to tighten emergency preparedness at active and former nuclear weapons sites.
Sean Sullivan, appointed DNFSB chairman by President Donald Trump in January, made the request in a Feb. 16 letter to then-acting Energy Secretary Grace Bochenek, who temporarily helmed the agency before Rick Perry was sworn in as secretary earlier this month.
The Department of Energy and DNFSB last met for a formal briefing on the issue nearly a year ago on April 16, 2016, a DNFSB spokesperson said by email Wednesday. Formal briefings are supposed to take place every six months.
“The delay is attributed to leadership changes at both the Board and DOE,” the DNFSB spokesperson wrote. “With leadership changes still occurring at DOE, Board staff is working with DOE to schedule the next brief in the near-term.”
“We are working with the DNFSB now to schedule the next semi-annual briefing for late April or early May,” an NNSA spokesperson wrote in a Friday email. “The Department requested to meet with the DNFSB in November and December, 2016; however, the meetings were not accepted by the Board.”
Since DNFSB dropped the recommendation, the NNSA has continued to update and strengthen its “policies and procedures related to Emergency Management [and] also increased management involvement and participation in site emergency preparedness exercises,” the spokesperson for the semiautonomous nuclear-weapons agency wrote.
In a rare use of its formal recommendation-making authority, the DNFSB in 2014 urged DOE to improve its ability to respond to natural and human-made emergencies at its national network of nuclear sites. The board asked DOE to comply with the recommendation by September 2016 — a timeline then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz balked at.
DOE formally responded to DNFSB in April 2015 with an Implementation Plan of Recommendation 2014-1 that included new headquarters-authored procedures and drills intended to homogenize and sharpen emergency preparedness across the nuclear complex. The plan, revised in July 2016, also called for DOE to brief DNFSB “approximately” every six months about the agency’s progress in tightening emergency preparedness around the complex.
DNFSB was not satisfied with this plan.
“We view the Implementation Plan of Recommendation 2014-1 as inadequate and significantly behind schedule as compared to Secretary Moniz’ originally stated intention,” Sullivan wrote in the Feb. 16 letter. “We encourage you to revisit the plan and consider revising it such that it will improve performance at sites with defense nuclear facilities in a more timely manner.”
The DNFSB’s recommendation was a reaction to deficiencies reported at defense nuclear facilities since prior to 2014 and through February 2016. The board dinged DOE for a swath of shortcomings at a broad batch of defense nuclear sites, including balky radios at the Nevada National Security Site; poorly developed evacuation drills at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas; and inadequate backup power systems at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
