In a revised order, the Department of Energy has relaxed the firewall it attempted to erect between personnel at nuclear-weapon sites and the federal agency responsible for sniffing out potential threats to public safety from those operations.
The Energy Department shared a draft of the revised Order 140.1 with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) in March, but the rewritten text of the controversial directive from May 2018 did not appear online until mid-June.
The DNFSB said in March the draft revised order seemed to resolve what it called an illegal assertion that DOE can decide whether the board needs access to certain facilities or information to make health and safety recommendations about defense-nuclear sites.
But on top of the revised order, the board wanted a memorandum of understanding with the Energy Department to “resolve operational interface issues between our agencies that will not be resolved through the Order,” DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton wrote this spring in a letter to Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette.
“The revised DOE Order 140.1 addresses the Board’s statutory concerns, and we look forward to developing an MOA with DOE to address operational concerns,” a DNFSB spokesperson said Friday.
The roughly 30-year-old board, which has a $30 million annual budget, makes health and safety recommendations about active and shuttered DOE nuclear-weapon sites, except naval reactors operations. The Energy Department must publicly agree or disagree with these recommendations, which are intended to protect the public from radiological and other hazards.
Among other things, the revised Order 140.1 deletes a requirement that DOE employees and contractors wait for headquarters approval — or, as the old order put it, “formulate consolidated DOE positions on policy” — before speaking to board staffers. The board said that requirement could delay what had for decades been routine exchanges of information between DOE site personnel and the embedded DNFSB technical staff.
The revision also includes a congressional directive, signed into law last year as part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, that DOE give DNFSB staff “prompt and unfettered” access to personnel and facilities the board deems necessary to its mission. However, the rewritten order still allows the secretary of energy to determine whether a board staffer “does not need such access” to do her or his job.
Similarly, the revised order incorporates another requirement from the 2020 defense authorization: that DOE provide a written explanation whenever it denies the defense board access to information, places, or people at active and shuttered weapon sites.
The revised order also softens, although by no means eliminates, DOE’s decision to strictly regulate what contractors can and cannot say to the DNFSB.
The original Order 140.1 said “DOE contractors will only respond to DNFSB requests when formally tasked to do so by an authorized Departmental Site Liaison.” The revised order directs “Departmental Site Liaisons to coordinate with DOE contractors to ensure proper responses to DNFSB requests.”
Under both the new and old order, DOE aims to prevent its contractors from winding up alone in a room with DNFSB personnel, writing that DOE “[f]ederal representatives have a right to attend contractor interviews.”
