Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
10/30/2015
The Department of Energy this week defended itself against criticism by the Carlsbad (N.M.) Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, whose chairman on Oct. 23 said a delayed release of a DOE report on recovery of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant “undercut” progress being made on WIPP safety culture change, training, and communication, after a 2014 truck fire and subsequent radiation release caused the plant to shut down. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last month said he expects the transuranic waste disposition site will reopen sometime in calendar year 2016, more than two years after a fire and radiation released forced its closure, but that date has faced skepticism from some lawmakers.
“The Department is committed to reopening the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in a safe manner,” DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) spokesman Steve Tetreault said by email on Tuesday. “The Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) appreciates the assistance of DOE Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) in evaluating the safety and work performance conditions at WIPP. We take them very seriously.”
The main finding of the EA report released last week, which examined WIPP operations from May 2014 to May 2015, was that workers were more concerned with hewing to the site recovery schedule than with safety. Among other things, the mayor’s task force knocked EA for releasing the report after most of the issues it cited had been resolved, and said DOE’s failure to immediately divulge the deficiencies was “very unprofessional” and could have delayed the implementation of corrective actions. “Generally an inspecting agency delivers an inspection deficiency report in a form describing explicitly each deficiency to be corrected,” said task force Chairman John Heaton. “This report had several specifics, but for the most part it spoke in generalities. And the three concluding recommendations were very general and did not outline the specifics necessary to meet the expectations of EA.”
The EA report’s final three recommendations were:
- “Senior contractor and federal line management should refocus and sustain efforts to improve the conduct of operations, contractor assurance, and safety culture at the site to reduce the potential for a serious incident at WIPP.”
- “WIPP operations contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), in conjunction with EM and CBFO, should continue to establish a fully activity-based, resource-loaded recovery schedule for WIPP that fully reflects the complex set of activities and corrective actions necessary for safe restart. Effective communications with employees will be essential as the new schedule is established.”
- “CBFO and NWP should continue to closely monitor safety performance and, if needed, take additional actions to address any identified negative trends.”
Tetreault said safety is the Office of Environmental Management’s “most important priority.” He said the office believes that since the time frame covered by the EA assessment, CBFO and NWP have taken “significant steps” to address the cited issues, including improvements to training, project oversight, conduct of operations, contractor assurance, and safety posture.
The EA analysis found that “schedule pressure” on WIPP recovery was an “underlying causal factor” of those issues. “A change in recovery schedule will ease near-term schedule pressure,” the report says. EA said that one of the primary reasons for a lack of safety focus was that WIPP’s schedule for reopening is mainly a “critical path schedule” with “no schedule contingency,” and that personnel stated in a recent worker safety report that they felt pressure to maintain WIPP’s recovery schedule. ”These conditions could be a precursor to poor safety performance,” the report states.
For example, NWP changed a filter on March 26, and had to evaluate and address five procedural safety violations in a one-month period related to the change-out. “In many cases, individuals developed corrective actions and injected them into the recovery schedule without the benefit of the issues management system processes,” the report states. “Bypassing these processes leads to an inability to effectively identify, analyze, and track issues; predict trends; take appropriate and effective corrective and preventive actions; and verify closure.”
Heaton said DOE “blaming” the schedule as the reason for a lack of attention to safety was “ridiculous” in light of the fact that DOE headquarters had approved the recovery timetable. DOE said this summer that additions to the facility’s repair schedule, including mandatory “safety-related activities,” must be finished before WIPP can reopen. DOE and NWP are in discussions on finalizing the new performance measurement baseline (PMB) for reopening WIPP. The previous PMB, which projected a $242 million recovery project that would end by March 2016, was scrapped in the face of concerns over faulty equipment and safety-related activities, among other issues.
But Tetreault highlighted schedule changes as an essential and integral part of WIPP’s ongoing recovery, noting that EA deemed the re-baselining of the project and ongoing production of a new PMB with a more realistic schedule a “good first step” in addressing the issues it cited at WIPP. “The EA memo contains several recommendations for further improvement, and we will evaluate and determine the best way to implement those recommendations to help ensure that we are working in the safest manner possible to reopen WIPP,” the spokesman said.
