Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
10/10/2014
A group of nuclear explosive safety senior technical advisors that has made safety-related recommendations about the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex Plant says their voice isn’t being heard, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board member Sean Sullivan told Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and NNSA Principal Deputy Administrator Madelyn Creedon this week. Speaking at an Oct. 7 DNFSB hearing on safety culture across the DOX complex, Sullivan said several of the advisors briefed the DNFSB on their concerns in August.
The Pantex Plant has been the subject of safety culture concerns since a 2012 safety culture study there revealed poor working conditions, cronyism and employees’ concerns that management would retaliate against them for reporting safety issues. Sullivan said the advisors told the Board that “the relationship with the folks there is that some Pantex personnel seemed to view the nuclear explosive safety studies as a barrier to overcome rather than a rigorous process to help them think through many potential issues and ensure the plant operates safely.” He said the advisors said “many of their actual suggestions meet with resistance rather than openness to actually make change.”
‘They Didn’t Feel Like Their Input Was Being Openly Received’
Sullivan did not go into detail during the Board hearing about what issues the advisors had raised, citing the sensitivity of the topics, but he told NS&D Monitor after the hearing that the advisors had raised issues in a series of reports and didn’t see progress on them. “They didn’t feel like their input was being openly received,” he said. “They’re pretty convinced that in many cases there just wasn’t an openness to change. They weren’t exactly sure why but they came to us telling us they were hopeful they’d get a better dialogue.”
Sullivan said he was worried that the process for making nuclear safety improvements was too complex. “Within NNSA, within the whole Pantex operation, there is a very elaborate process for ensuring safety controls are proper,” he said. “In some respects it seems like the process is so elaborate it may actually be an impediment. People don’t want to go down that road because the process itself is burdensome.” He said the advisors wanted NNSA to be more open about their own process and “more willing to make change where change was in the interest of continuing to improve. They sensed resistance to that. It was like NNSA had plateaued and they were happy with the plateau.”
Is a Communication Problem to Blame?
Creedon noted in her testimony to the Board that the technical advisors are independent contractors and aren’t involved in the implementation of their recommendations, which she suggested could have created a disconnect. “Maybe there’s a communication issue where they don’t always seem or may not be fully aware how and where their advice has been implemented,” she said. “That may be part of the problem, but given the results it surely isn’t all of the problem. So this is something I will definitely look into and as soon as I can get down to Pantex we’ll spend some time down there and we’ll talk to these senior technical advisors as well to find out what’s going on.”
Moniz also promised to look further into the issue, and he emphasized the importance of improving the safety culture and Pantex and across the weapons complex. He told the Board that a safety culture improvement panel was being set up to oversee actions on safety culture across the complex. “We have to move forward on the modernization program,” he said. “We need to make sure we are enforcing these safety culture improvements continuously. It’s very important every day that we are doing work in these facilities. We also need to think about how that safety environment can be improved dramatically as we go through the modernization over the next—unfortunately I can’t say two or three years but two or three decades.”
