The U.S. Department of Energy has until late September to either accept or reject the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB) recommendation that the agency fix perceived safety defects at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, the board said in a recent letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
According to the Aug. 22 letter, newly posted to the independent federal agency’s website, DOE effectively rejected at least parts of the multi-faceted Feb. 20 recommendation. In its first recommendation of the Donald Trump administration, the DNFSB said DOE should make several improvements to explosives handling procedures and equipment at the nuclear weapons assembly-and-disassembly plant near Amarilo, Texas.
The Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), in an April letter to the DNFSB, said it accepted the Pantex recommendation. However, board Chairman Bruce Hamilton now says the five-page letter’s language, and NNSA’s implementation plan, “in fact reject significant parts of the Recommendation.”
In her April letter to the board, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty said the agency has already tweaked Pantex safety procedures to address some of the changes that the board sought in its recommendation, and that others updates were either forthcoming or would not be necessary.
The April letter left Hamilton and his colleagues scratching their heads. So, in his August letter to Gordon-Hagerty’s boss, the DNFSB chair said “it remains unclear to us what specific actions the Department will take to address the recommendation,” and asked for a formal acceptance or rejection be published in the Federal Register.
The Pantex recommendation, one of two DNFSB has made so far during the Donald Trump administration, asks DOE and NNSA to address: cracks in a tool used to lift high explosives out of W76 warheads; procedures that may expose the W87’s warhead’s arming system to jostling during disassembly; the potential for a worker to crush parts of the B61 gravity bomb by tripping and falling on a certain piece of equipment; and even the potential that a W78 warhead could be struck by lightning while moving from one location to another within the Pantex grounds.
The DNFSB said these hazards might result in “high explosive violent reaction and/or inadvertent nuclear detonation consequences” that give members of the public outside Pantex’s gates a “significantly” higher radiation dose than 25 rem — around 5.5 percent of what the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers a lethal dose, and the maximum dose DOE plans against when assessing the risks of nuclear-weapon servicing.
In April, Gordon-Hagerty specifically said the NNSA and its Pantex contractor, the Bechtel National-led Consolidated Nuclear Security, had made changes to Pantex safety protocols to help prevent potentially catastrophic — if unlikely — consequences from certain “Falling Man” scenarios. What these changes were, Gordon-Hagerty did not explain.
As for Pantex’s special tooling, some of the issues DNSFB identified do not “result in challenging adequate protection of public health or safety,” Gordon-Hagerty wrote in the April letter. Certain scenarios DNFSB identified, Gordon-Hagerty said, are not “credible,” because such scenarios would require “deliberate or malicious procedural violations.”
Many of the issues identified by the DNFSB in its recommendation, written after inspections conducted in Amarillo in 2017, date back nearly a decade to the time when a team led by BWX Technologies managed Pantex for the NNSA
Now, the Energy Department has 30 days from the date it received Hamilton’s latter to either accept or reject the recommendation formally in a notice legally required to be published in the Federal Register. That would give the agency until around the week of Sept. 23 to publish its decision.
A DOE spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
