The Department of Energy on Sunday finalized changes to its rule about nuclear safety management that, according to the government’s independent nuclear health and safety watchdog, could encourage contractors to unsafely increase radioactive hazards in old buildings.
After about two years of deliberation, the agency published its changes to Title 10, Part 830 of the Code of Federal Regulations on Sunday in a Federal Register notice. Despite an outcry from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), DOE removed from the rule a list of specific definitions for nuclear facility hazard categories: qualitative ratings of the danger a given facility might pose to the public.
As it has previously, DOE said that the new rule still requires contractors at both active and closed defense nuclear sites to refer to an agency standard when assigning a hazard category to a facility. Hazard Category 1 is the most potentially dangerous, Hazard Category 3 the least. The potential danger deals in part with the amount of fissile material present in a facility.
In a nod to one of the DNFSB’s concerns about hazard categorization, the DOE decided not to reserve the right to update the hazard categorization guidelines in the agency’s Standard 1027 with a “successor document.” The board complained that such a successor document might not be subject to the federal rulemaking process.
The DNFSB also critiqued both the old and new rule, warning that DOE’s directive to categorize nuclear weapons facilities in a way “consistent with” an agency standard would create “an inconsistent gradation of defense nuclear facilities in the complex” — that is, the same DOE hazard category might mean one thing to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its active nuclear weapons programs and another to Office of Environmental Management, which cleans up inactive Cold War-era weapons production sites.
