Chris Schneidmiller
WC Monitor
07/31/2015
The Department of Energy has carried out nearly all commitments made in 2011 to strengthen the “nuclear safety culture” for the still-unfinished Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site in Washington state and the broader DOE defense nuclear enterprise, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
The board has scheduled an Aug. 26 hearing in Kennewick, Wash., to consider efforts by DOE and plant contractor Bechtel National to ensure WTP workers are empowered to alert management to issues they believe could undermine safety at the facility.
“We agree that progress has been made and that only two commitments from the DOE Implementation Plan (IP) remain open,” DNFSB Vice Chair Jessie Roberson said in an April 7 letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “One commitment deals with the review of the Bechtel National, Inc. contract for the WTP project to ‘implement appropriate mechanisms to achieve balanced priorities and include safety culture elements.’ The second commitment deals with the final approval of the site-specific safety culture sustainment plans by the Program Secretarial Officers.”
In a July 21 letter to Roberson, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said it had signed off on the safety culture sustainment plans for Hanford and defense nuclear sites in Idaho, New Mexico, New York, South Carolina, and Tennessee. That theoretically leaves only one commitment unfulfilled, though another recent DOE document makes clear the safety culture situation at Hanford remains a work in progress.
Safety culture is one of a number of problems that have challenged construction of the WTP, which is intended to process 56 million gallons of World War II- and Cold War-era radioactive waste stored underground at Hanford. The cost of the plant has nearly tripled to $12.3 billion, and anticipated completion has been pushed back several years to 2019, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In 2010, the DNFSB began investigating claims of a “failed safety culture” from whistleblower Walter Tamosaitis, who said he had been pushed out of his management position with subcontractor URS at Hanford after reporting a number of potential safety violations. The board’s 2011 report stated that “expressions of technical dissent affecting safety at WTP, especially those affecting schedule or budget, were discouraged, if not opposed or rejected without review. Project management subtly, consistently, and effectively communicated to employees that opinions counter to decisions reached by management would not be dealt with on their merits.”
The board recommended DOE take steps to ensure “prompt, major improvement” of the safety culture at WTP, including asserting “federal control at the highest level and direct, track, and validate the specific corrective actions to be taken,” and reviewing whether the weaknesses extended to other DOE defense nuclear facilities.
In December of that year, DOE issued a detailed implementation plan outlining dozens of actions it intended to carry out to meet the DNFSB recommendations. This plan is now apparently nearing completion.
The department has also published three follow-up assessments of the safety culture at WTP, most recently in June. The new report said DOE found “improvement” at both the department’s Office of River Protection (which is overseeing the WTP project) and Bechtel regarding how “personnel perceive the behaviors important for a healthy safety culture.” On various topics, the report cited both “positive observations” from the survey (“Most interviewees agreed that if something is an immediate safety hazard, there is no question that safety takes priority over other activities and that there are always resources available to take care of safety issues.”) and areas needing more attention (“Several interviewees emphasized the need for … funding to support research on better technologies and science to do the cleanup mission faster and with commensurate quality and safety improvements.”).
However, the watchdog organization Hanford Challenge also noted that this year’s survey findings were “statistically insignificant” relative to those of the 2014 report. It also highlighted some potentially worrisome results, including that 35% of surveyed employees “reported a lack of ability to openly challenge management decisions.”
“The pressure to declare victory and put the issue of DOE’s broken safety culture in the past is distributing,” according to Hanford Challenge. “The stakes are too high to paper over a broken safety culture at a facility like Hanford.”
The DOE Office of River Protection referred questions on the safety culture efforts to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which declined to comment on the upcoming hearing beyond the details included in the Federal Register notice. Bechtel did not respond to a request for comment.
The first session of the Aug. 26 meeting is set to include testimony from high-level DOE officials, the head of the department’s Office of River Protection (ORP), and the federal project director for the plant, among others, according to a Federal Register notice published on Monday. The second session will feature testimony from a high-level DNFSB technical worker regarding DOE’s safety-culture improvements and a staff plan for closing out the board’s recommendations regarding plant safety. The meeting is due to wrap up with board consideration of the staff proposal.
