WASHINGTON — At Congress’ direction, the Department of Energy is revising a controversial order that curtailed the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB) access to nuclear sites and personnel, Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said Thursday.
“We’re in the process of revising the order and I will be meeting with the DNFSB and we’ll have this resolved within the next, perhaps, two weeks,” Brouillette said of Order 140.1 during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations energy and waster subcommittee.
Brouillette was answering a question from Sen. Tom Udall (N.M.). It was the second time this week a senator from New Mexico put the new DOE boss on the spot about the issue.
In a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) — one of the architects of the legal language that forced DOE to tweak the order — asked Brouillette for the same progress report that his colleague later demanded.
In both hearings, Brouillette recited the same script he has read from since he helped write Order 140.1: the DNFSB is only an advisory entity, DOE never intended to abridge the board’s access to defense-nuclear sites and personnel, and the 2018 order does not violate the agency’s legal authority.
Order 140.1 is meant to “clearly define the roles of the DNFSB versus the Department of Energy, who is the regulator for these nuclear matters,” Brouillette told Heinrich on Tuesday. “[T]he DNFSB in our opinion, and I think in accordance with the statute, is an advisory board.”
The DNFSB itself disagrees vehemently with that legal take, maintaining that it alone has discretion to decide what information it requires from the Energy Department in order to judge whether defense-nuclear activities might pose a hazard to members of the public outside that site. The agency has no regulatory authority over the Energy Department, but submits safety recommendations with which the energy secretary much affirm or dispute.
Congress created the board in 1988 to protect the public from the hazards of active and shuttered defense nuclear sites, except those operated by the DOE Naval Reactors program. The Energy Department believes that it may, under that law, exclude from DNFSB oversight some facilities that agency leaders believe cannot threaten the public.
“At no point did we seek [through Order 140.1] to deny DNFSB access to a DOE facility, or access to the materials they need to actually advise us,” Brouillette told Heinrich.
Last year, the DNFSB reported that some of its technical inspectors had been barred from meetings of the Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Since DOE issued 140.1, Heinrich in particular has taken up the torch for the DNFSB, inserting language into the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that requires DOE to give the board “prompt and unfettered access to defense nuclear sites.”
On Thursday, Brouillette, who cut his teeth in Washington as a committee staffer in the House, said he was “very much aware” of that language.
