In a few years, the Department of Energy could make its practices for categorizing hazards found in nuclear facilities a formal federal rule, the agency wrote in a recent letter to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
DOE would not begin the rulemaking until 2025 at the earliest, according to the June 27 letter to the board posted online recently, but if the agency goes through with the plan, it would firm up the practice of grading nuclear facilities on a scale of one to three — one is the most hazardous, three the least — from an internal agency standard to a federal regulation.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has publicly urged DOE to codify the categorization rules since 2018.
Now, “[a]t a minimum, the Department will initiate a rulemaking in the Federal Register which will propose to formally incorporate the Department’s hazard categorization Standard into the rule,” according to a 22 page enclosure appended to the letter Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm sent to Joyce Connory, chair of DNFSB.
Garrett Smith, director of the Office of Nuclear Safety in DOE’s Office of Environment,
Health, Safety and Security, was to lead the effort, Granholm wrote. The rulemaking would follow an internal deliberation by a DOE review team that was supposed to establish a charter by Sept. 1, according to last month’s letter.
The possibility of a rulemaking — which under the timeline shared last month would begin well after the end of Joe Biden’s first term as President — is DOE’s latest volley in a discussion with DNFSB that has gone on since 2018, when the department proposed changes to its nuclear safety management rule, found in title 10, part 830 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
DOE followed through with the overhaul to the rule, called 10 CFR 830 for short, in October 2020. DNFSB objected, among other things, to the omission of the existing hazard categorization process, described in a DOE standard last updated in 2019.
DOE said at the time it would still use the categorization process, but DNFSB said that without the force of a rule, the government might end up with “an inconsistent gradation of defense nuclear facilities in the complex.” That is, various nuclear weapon sites across the country might not use the hazard categories in the same way.
DOE’s hazard categories attempt to describe the potential danger a nuclear facility poses to members of the public outside the boundaries of a DOE site. Ratings reflect in part the amount of fissile material at a facility.
