The Department of Energy rejected a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) recommendation intended to better protect workers at the Savannah River Site’s tritium facilities from fires, explosions, and other accidents that could expose the public to radiation.
In doing so, DOE and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) also rejected the independent agency’s conclusion that the South Carolina site’s emergency-response capabilities might not be able to “effectively respond” to accidents at the tritium facilities.
“DOE/NNSA remains fully compliant and committed in our duties to the American public in the safe operation of these facilities,” NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty wrote in a Sept. 10 letter that the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) only recently posted online. “Therefore, I do not accept Recommendation 2019-2.”
The NNSA, which manages the Energy Department’s nuclear stockpile work, operates the tritium facilities at Savannah River.
The agency harvests and processes tritiuim, a radioactive hydrogen isotope that increases the explosive power of nuclear weapons, at the Savannah River Site’s 217–H Vault; Buildings 233–H and 234–H; and the Tritium Extraction Facility. The NNSA generates the isotope in a Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power reactor, then trucks the material to Savannah River, where it is retrieved and placed in reservoirs that are later inserted into nuclear weapons at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Tritium decays relatively rapidly, so weapons reservoirs must regularly be replaced. Less regularly, tritium -harvesting infrastructure can be replaced, as the NNSA has proposed doing. In her letter, Gordon-Hagerty said a planned next-generation tritium plant “will fundamentally improve safety” at the Savannah River Site.
DNFSB Recommendation 2019-2, only the second of the Trump adminsitration, advised DOE and NNSA to better protect workers at Savannah River Site facilities from what the board called “energetic accidents:” fires, falling cranes, or even explosions that might release large quantities of radioactive tritium, “creating the potential for acute radiation sickness or fatality.”
The DNFSB has no regulatory authority over DOE or NNSA ‒ the Energy Department is its own regulator at defense-nuclear sites ‒ but it may make safety recommendations with which the agency must publicly agree or disagree.
