The National Nuclear Security Administration backdated letters to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and claimed its own safety rules actually permitted safety deficiencies the rules were supposed to prevent, the board said.
In a letter late last year to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, the board complained about “the recent practice of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of dating its letters to the Board weeks prior to their transmittal. This practice results in an inaccurate record of correspondence between the Board and NNSA, incorrectly implying that NNSA’s responses were transmitted to the Board much earlier than they actually were.”
The DNFSB is the federal safety inspector for Department of Energy defense-nuclear sites. The independent agency does not regulate DOE but can make safety recommendations with which the Secretary of Energy, or a designee, must publicly agree or disagree.
In the letter posted online Dec. 19, DNFSB members called out the NNSA not only for backdating letters to the board, but for interpreting its own safety regulations too loosely. The board cited two examples at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, one at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., and one that applied to the NNSA’s entire complex.
“NNSA has recently provided responses to Board reporting requirements that only partially address the safety concerns identified in the Board’s correspondence,” the DNFSB wrote. “NNSA’s responses have sometimes rationalized that DOE’s and NNSA’s safety directives can be interpreted as allowing known safety deficiencies to persist contrary to the plain language of the safety directives, and, in one case, NNSA did not provide the Board the requested report.”
