The Department of Energy last week defended a 2020 update to a key nuclear safety management regulation but said the agency will work with a federal nuclear watchdog over its “technical concerns” with the final rule — including as it relates to aging nuclear facilities.
The DOE “continues to conclude that its current regulatory framework, as revised by the October 2020 rulemaking, provides adequate protection of public and worker health and safety across the DOE complex,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm wrote in a Sept. 8 letter to Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Chair Joyce Connery.
Likewise, in a nod to the DNFSB, the DOE plans to review facilities now dubbed Hazard Category 3, which pose the least potential danger, are properly classified. Hazard Category 1 is considered to have the most risk. DNFSB last year worried that DOE’s changes to hazard categorization rules might encourage bad behavior by site-management contractors. The DOE has characterized its 2020 final rule as a modernization of nuclear safety management, by reducing duplicative tasks without hurting safety.
While the Joe Biden administration in its appropriations request floated the idea of moving a military cleanup program to the Department of Energy from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, lawmakers seem inclined to keep things as they are, according to a recent analysis from the Congressional Research Service.
The White House budget request in May included a proposal to transfer oversight of the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) from the Army Corps to DOE’s Office of Legacy Management, which manages long-term stewardship of remediated sites, the Congressional Research Service said in a report dated Sept. 1. The Army Corps would still do the actual cleanup.
But neither the spending package passed by the full House of Representatives in July nor the Senate Appropriations Committee bill, endorsed by the panel in August, includes the proposed FUSRAP transfer. The 2021 fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
Multiple administrations have proposed nesting FUSRAP in DOE, as it used to be. The DOE budget request includes $250 million for FUSRAP, the same as appropriated to Army Corps for the program in fiscal 2020.
