Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
10/24/2014
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla.—The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has easily absorbed recent Congressionally mandated changes to its statute, but outgoing Board Chairman Peter Winokur said this week that he feared that more drastic proposals for the Board would be damaging to the Board’s mission. Led by House Republicans, Congress last year directed the DNFSB to run its recommendations by the Department of Energy and also required the Board to have an Inspector General. Other proposals, like a requirement to force the Board to perform cost-benefit analyses on its recommendations, were met by opposition from Congressional Democrats.
Those proposals could resurface if the Senate were to be controlled by Republicans, Winokur said. “The Board is not the Secretary of Energy,” Winokur said at the Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum Oct. 21. “The Secretary of Energy has the responsibility for putting all of the puzzle pieces together and getting the mission done. The Board provides only one set of inputs. Asking the Board to be doing things like cost-benefit analysis, that begins to intrude on the Secretary’s responsibilities.” On the sidelines of the meeting, Winokur added: “Personally I’m concerned about it. I’ve seen some of the changes. I don’t think they’re in the best interest of the Board. At the end the Congress makes these decisions and we’ll live by them.”
Winokur: ‘I Can’t Stay on the Board Forever’
Winokur announced that he was stepping down as the Board’s chairman earlier this month and said he would remain on the Board until new member Daniel Santos was confirmed by the Senate, preserving the five-member Board’s quorum. This week, he said he was hopeful Santos would be confirmed quickly, though there are no guarantees the Senate will act on the nomination after the November mid-term elections and Winokur said he would not stay on board in perpetuity. “I can’t stay on the Board forever,” Winokur said. “The Board not having a quorum would be very damaging. We definitely want the Board to have a quorum.”
Federal Oversight, CAS, Safety Culture Top List of Concerns
As he prepares to leave the Board, Winokur said he was most concerned with inadequate federal oversight, contractor assurance systems and safety culture across the DOE complex. “I’m not going to say these things are getting better. I’ll just say they need to improve,” he said. He noted that in many cases, federal staffing levels are decreasing at site offices. “There are fewer safety professionals,” he said. “Recently there was an IG report saying they beefed up the federal project staff at the UPF project which was a positive sign but in general across the complex I don’t see a lot of evidence that the federal workforce is being strengthened and then there is the issue of the federal technical capability and more work needs to be done in that area, too.”
He said the federal workforce is key to maintaining transactional oversight of complex high-hazard nuclear operations, and he rejected an approach for performance-based oversight of those operations. “I think it’s important when you’re looking at low probability that you do this transactional oversight because what happens over time is things change,” he said. “So you perform a process once and then 10 times, 50 times, but how do you do it the 50th time. Something changes. That gets you in trouble. You have to understand the what and the how of what’s going on when you’re doing these kinds of operations.” At the same time, he acknowledged that federal staff can be everywhere, and he said contractor assurance systems need to be strengthened across the Board to provide confidence in the operations being performed across the complex.
Winokur Advocates ‘Chronic Unease’
The Board has also held a series of meetings on safety culture around the complex over the last year, and Winokur said budget pressures, organizational changes and a lack of leadership as a result of Senate inaction on DOE nominees was having a detrimental impact on the weapons complex. “I believe DOE is convincing itself it is too risk averse and conservative. I think a better way to look at it and I think Steve Erhart, the NPO manager at Y-12 and Pantex, said … the Department should live with a chronic unease about things,” Winokur said.
