DNFSB CLOSES NUCLEAR SAFETY OVERSIGHT RECOMMENDATION

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is closing a decade-old recommendation on oversight of complex, high-hazard nuclear operations, but it says it will continue to keep tabs on the Department’s progress in strengthening federal safety assurance. The recommendation, issued May 21, 2004, helped revitalize the implementation of Integrated Safety Management across the Department. The Board said that it hadn’t fully verified one component of DOE’s implementation plan regarding federal safety assurance capabilities. “The Board will continue to track DOE’s efforts in this area, especially in light of the reorganization of DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security and recent shortcomings in federal oversight at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” DNFSB Chairman Peter Winokur said in a May 1 letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Despite closing the recommendation, Winokur called on DOE to provide within six months a briefing and report on the Department’s “federal safety oversight capability and its criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of federal safety oversight of high hazard nuclear operations at DOE’s defense nuclear facilities.”