The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Boards sent the Department of Energy a reminder about overdue safety reports for several nuclear weapon sites, according to a letter dated Oct. 20.
DOE’s delay is “affecting the Board’s safety oversight,” Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) chair Joyce Connery wrote in the letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
The board, the government’s independent safety agency for nuclear-weapon sites other than naval reactors sites, said in the letter that it wants to see four reports: three dealing with individual sites and one that applies to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) entire enterprise.
The three site-specific reports are about:
- Leaks at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Plutonium Facility, which is supposed to become a plutonium pit factory capable of producing multiple war-ready first-stage nuclear-weapon cores by 2024. DNFSB asked for a report by Sept. 12.
- The criticality safety program at the Nevada National Security Site’s National Criticality Experiments Research Center, which the board wanted by Sept. 15. The center is inside the Nevada site’s Device Assembly Facility, which among other things houses the Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research facility — a high-speed crash chamber for plutonium pellets — and a large plutonium storage area.
- The Pantex Plant’s dosimetry program, which the board wanted by Oct. 10. Pantex stopped processing readings for its employees’ wearable, radiation-monitoring badges since 2020. The Texas weapons-assembly hub’s dosimetry reading equipment stopped working that year and the site started shipping dosimeters out to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for readings.
Aside from those three reports, the DNFSB also wants a report about NNSA’s plans for assessing earthquake hazards across the nuclear security enterprise. The board asked for that report by Aug. 20.