The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is revising its plan to implement recommendations the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board made this year about the Pantex nuclear-weapon servicing plant in Texas.
“The Department of Energy has accepted the need to revise and update our implementation plan,” James McConnell, NNSA associate administrator for safety, infrastructure, and operations, said at a Dec. 12 meeting of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB).
McConnell is a former DNFSB staffer. He spent 12 years with the independent federal nuclear health-and-safety watchdog, including two years as a DNFSB site representative at Pantex.
He did not say when the NNSA might provide its revised implementation plan — the document that explains how the agency and its site contractor are addressing or will address the nearly year-old recommendation on tooling, work procedures, and so-called falling-technician accidents at the nation’s only nuclear-weapon assembly and disassembly site.
The DNFSB said the NNSA’s first implementation plan, delivered in April, purported to accept the board’s safety recommendations while effectively rejecting some of them. The plan said that it would address the board’s recommendations, but not how it would do so, DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton wrote in an August letter to then-Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.
McConnell maintained that the NNSA did in fact accept Recommendation 2019-1, and that the implementation plan was “a good-faith effort” to put some of the DNFSB’s suggestions to use at Pantex.
The DNFSB has made two recommendations so far during the Donald Trump administration. The Pantex recommendation asks DOE and NNSA to address: cracks in a tool used to lift high explosives out of W76 warheads; procedures that may expose the W87’s warhead’s arming system to jostling during disassembly; the potential for a worker to crush parts of the B61 gravity bomb by tripping and falling on a certain piece of equipment; and the potential that a W78 warhead could be struck by lightning while moving from one location to another within the Pantex grounds.
Both the NNSA and Pantex management contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security have said they were working to improve some of these potential risks before the DNFSB delivered Recommendation 2019-1 in February.
The board reaffirmed Recommendation 2019-1 in August, meaning the DNFSB will not revise the document after multiple interactions with NNSA staff.
The DNFSB is a roughly $30-million independent agency that makes health-and-safety recommendations to protect the public from the hazards of current and former DOE nuclear-weapon sites. The agency has no jurisdiction over nuclear naval sites, and does not regulate DOE. Instead, the board makes safety recommendations with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree.
The DNFSB’s other recommendation to DOE this year involved improving emergency response capabilities at the Savannah River National Site in Aiken, S.C., specifically where the NNSA harvests tritium for later insertion into nuclear weapons.
