Restructuring the independent federal agency charged with health and safety oversight at Department of Energy nuclear-weapon and cleanup sites will not involve layoffs, according to the head of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
“We are not going to have to involuntarily separate anyone,” acting DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton said in an Aug. 16 telephone interview with Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Hamilton spoke to the Monitor a day after the DNFSB announced a major reorganization that will begin in 2019, and under which the agency plans to cut its total headcount to 79 from around 100. The agency also intends to nearly double the number of inspectors deployed permanently throughout the DOE nuclear weapons complex, and set up two new field offices near defense-nuclear sites in Nevada and New Mexico, Hamilton said.
In the past 12 months or so, the DNFSB has trimmed its headcount to just below 100 full-time employees through what Hamilton called “natural attrition”: not filling vacancies created when full-time board staff leave the agency. Sustaining that hiring freeze could further thin the ranks, Hamilton said.
In addition, Hamilton said he will seek eight volunteers to leave headquarters and become resident DNFSB inspectors at DOE nuclear sites. That would bring the board’s total resident-inspector count to 18 from 10. The board only employed seven resident inspectors at four DOE nuclear sites at the Monitor’s deadline Friday. Three resident-inspector vacancies will be filled soon, Hamilton said. One of the positions was set to be filled by Aug. 20.
The DNFSB currently posts resident site inspectors for: the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash.; the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas; and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The board was slated to install one resident inspector at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on Aug. 20, and is set to post another there in December.
Washington-based DNFSB technical staffers already make periodic trips to DOE facilities to conduct inspections that are summarized in the board’s weekly reports. However, Hamilton believes such personnel could do “more effective” work if they live near the sites.
“It’s my view that having somebody there day-to-day, building relationships, seeing things over and over again, asking various questions over and over again is a far more effective way to provide safety oversight, which is our mission,” Hamilton said. “[Y]ou’re better off in the field than you are here at headquarters making trips.”
By law, the DNFSB may employ as many as 130 full-time personnel. In its fiscal 2019 budget request, the roughly $30-million-a-year agency said it had 117 full-time employees on the payroll in 2018.
Hamilton himself proposed restructuring the DNFSB. The four-member board approved his proposal the week of Aug. 13 by a 3-1 vote.
The lone dissenter, former board chair Joyce Connery, slammed the reorganization as an overreach by Hamilton, who Connery said crafted the plan in secret and sprang it on members “without so much as a discussion,” according to a record of the vote posted online.
Connery also complained that Hamilton breached the spirit of the 1988 legislation that created the DNFSB, which she said provides that “each Member of the Board shall have equal responsibility and authority in establishing decisions and determining actions of the Board.”
Connery’s colleagues, Jessie Hill Roberson and Daniel Santos, joined Hamilton to approve the reorganization. The board has had only four of its five seats filled since February, when Sean Sullivan resigned as chairman after suggesting that Congress eliminate the board.
Santos said Hamilton’s proposed reorganization, if properly executed, could “improve the early identification, awareness, and independent assessment of safety issues at defense nuclear facilities to inform the Secretary of Energy before they become major problems that could impact public health and safety.”
The DNFSB has no regulatory authority over DOE, which is its own regulator at defense-nuclear sites. However, the board may make safety recommendations with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree.
