The U.S. Department of Energy has doubled down in the new year on its refusal to accept a safety recommendation from the Defense Nuclear Faciliites Safety Board (DNFSB) regarding tritium facilities at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
“[T]he Savannah River Tritium Enterprise (SRTE) provides adequate protection of the public and worker safety,” Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of DOE’s semiautnomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), wrote in a Jan. 3 letter to DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton. “DOE/NNSA concludes that we are providing adequate protection to the public and the workers at SRTE.”
The DNFSB published the letter on its website last week. The missive marks the second time DOE has rejected board recommendation 2019-2, effectively ending, for now, the recommendation’s chance of affecting change to this particular part of Savannah River’s mission. The letter also marks the latest confrontation over DNFSB jurisdiction at Energy Department sites.
The DNFSB issued recommendation 2019-2 last summer. The board advised DOE to bolster its emergency response capabilities against possible widespread tritium contamination at Savannah River, suggesting among other things that the agency reduce the amount of tritium stored in one place at one time.
Tritium is a radioactive hydrogen isotope used in nuclear weapons. The NNSA produces the material in a civilian reactor operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority and harvests it at the Savannah River Site. Gas harvested in South Carolina is bottled in reservoirs and installed in weapons at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Both times it rejected recommendation 2019-2 — Gordon-Hagerty delivered the first rejection by letter in September — the Energy Department said its emergency response capabilities at Savannah River are adequate, in part because its planning for tritium exposure assumes what the agency characterizes as a highly unlikely worst-case scenario involving all the material on-site.
On the jurisdictional end of things, the DNFSB, an independent federal group with a roughly $30-million annual budget, says it alone has the power to determine whether DOE is adequately protecting the public from the various hazards of active and shuttered defense nuclear sites.
The Energy Department, since the early days of the Donald Trump administration, has said the DNFSB has no jurisdiction over defense-nuclear facilities that the agency deems less hazardous, or over the employees who work in such facilities.
The Energy Department formalized that stance in Order 140.1, issued in May 2018. The same order said that DOE and contractor personnel cannot talk to DNFSB without first clearing the communication with senior DOE leaders.
DOE now has three months to explain its decision to Congress in a written report. The report is due to House and Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, plus the House Energy and Commerce and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committees. The reports are essentially an oversight tool for lawmakers, as Congress cannot make the DOE accept a recommendation the agency has rejected. Reached Friday by email, a board spokesperson had no comment about DOE’s rejection of 2019-2.
Going forward, DNFSB could choose to close recommendation-2019 and issue a new recommendation about Savannah River tritium facilities.
Meanwhile, Gordon-Hagerty has said in letters to the board that planned improvements at Savannah River Site could improve tritium safety in an emergency. A next-generation tritium plant, the Tritium Finishing Facility, “will fundamentally improve safety,” the NNSA chief has said.
The agency plans to break ground on the new tritium facility sometime in the middle of this decade, according to its 2020 budget request. Workers would start handling tritium there early next decade.
