WASHINGTON — The federal government’s independent watchdog for defense nuclear sites backed off a formal safety recommendation to the Energy Department here Tuesday, citing a lack of confidence that the measure would better prepare DOE facilities for emergencies.
In an open meeting at its headquarters, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) voted 4-1 to close a recommendation it made to DOE in 2014 to assess and improve what the board calls “emergency preparedness and response” at 10 DOE sites. Board member Joyce Connery voted “no.”
No DOE officials attended Tuesday’s meeting. Several were invited in July when the DNFSB announced it would discuss the recommendation publicly. Among them were Energy Secretary Rick Perry and National Nuclear Security Administration chief Frank Klotz.
Sean Sullivan, who President Donald Trump appointed chairman of the DNFSB in January, said Perry was “unable to attend” Tuesday. Sullivan also said the board hesitated to brief Klotz because the Obama administration appointee could soon be replaced by a Trump nominee.
“So we had that aspect of a team that’s not in place,” Sullivan said.
The DNFSB made the recommendation in the wake of the 2011 reactor meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the 2014 radiation leak at DOE’s underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
In response to the recommendation, then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told DNFSB that his agency would create new headquarters-authored procedures and drills intended to homogenize and sharpen emergency preparedness across the nuclear complex.
Some of the that work has been completed, a DNFSB engineer testified Tuesday, and another update is due from DOE in December: more than a year after the board first asked the agency to wrap up its reply to the recommendation.
But none of those actions on DOE’s part “are likely to improve implementation of the emergency preparedness and response at defense nuclear facilities,” DNFSB engineer Christopher Roscetti told the board. “There’s nothing [in the recommendation] that actually holds the sites accountable to actually improve their implementation.”
