In an official report to Congress about tritium-safety oversight, the Department of Energy again sought to avoid a legal fight about whether its workforce is subject to recommendations from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB).
The independent federal agency feared the Energy Department might have rejected a 2019 recommendation to bolster the Savannah River Site’s ability to respond to widespread tritium contamination because most of the people who would be harmed by such an event are DOE employees or contractors.
The DNFSB also monitors certain facilities, such as the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, administered by the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
In the brief report last week, which DOE was legally obligated to file with congressional committees after it rejected DNFSB Recommendation 2019-2, the agency and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) again denied that was the case.
The DNFSB’s tritium recommendation “ignores the reasoning and analysis underlying the DOE/NNSA position and incorrectly asserts that the disagreement [over tritium safety] has to do with Board’s authority rather than the Board’s analysis,” according to the department’s filing.
Tritium is the radioactive hydrogen isotope that boosts the fission yield of thermonuclear weapons. The DNFSB worried that an accident such as a fire, explosion, or falling crane could disperse the gaseous isotope throughout the Savannah River Site and overwhelm emergency response personnel.
The two federal agencies have clashed over whether the board can make recommendations about federal employees and contractors at active and shuttered nuclear-weapon sites since DOE published Order 140.1 in May 2018, ordering stricter guidelines for its interactions with the government’s nuclear health-and-safety watchdog.
In the report flagged June 11 in the Federal Register, DOE pressed the same case it repeatedly brought to the DNFSB last year: that the board ignored improvements to be made, or already made, at the South Carolina facility, that substantially address the tritium recommendation. Improvements include tightening tritium safety protocols, new infrastructure such as the improved Tritium Extraction Facility that came online last year, and the roughly $600-million Tritium Finishing Facility planned to replace Savannah River’s current tritium processing plant by the early 2030s.
The Energy Department’s argument has gone nowhere with the DNFSB so far. Aside from defending its oversight turf, the board has also asserted that federal law gives it the authority to determine how safe is safe enough — at least when it comes to whether the board should issue a safety recommendation.
The NNSA 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.
