The U.S. Department of Energy’s record of policing itself is “mixed at best,” and the agency might benefit from independent oversight by an entity such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said Tuesday.
Pallone made his remarks during a House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee hearing on U.S. nuclear infrastructure.
The lawmaker cited a 2014 report, from the Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, which found DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) lacked a strong plan for modernizing and upgrading its national security mission.
The 2014 report said the NNSA had lost credibility in its capacity to deliver needed facilities on time and on budget. The report also said the current NNSA governance model of semiautonomy is fundamentally flawed because the agency’s administration is not provided true autonomy from DOE headquarters.
“The Administrator of NNSA is not provided the autonomy from DOE headquarters staffs necessary to accomplish the mission, nor has this governance model created a sense of accountability for mission accomplishment within the involved DOE headquarters staffs,” the 2014 report said.
Introducing an outside regulator might improve things, Pallone said: “This is an idea that the Subcommittee on Energy has explored on a bipartisan basis in the past and it may be time to do so again.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is primarily the regulator for commercial nuclear power and nuclear waste operations in the United States.
Pallone’s remarks didn’t draw any immediate comments from his colleagues on the subcommittee or a panel of witnesses, which included senior officials from the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, NNSA, and NRC.
The New Jersey Democrat’s office did not return a call or emails asking if the lawmaker plans to draft any legislation to assign DOE an outside regulator.
