One of two Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board resident inspectors at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant has left to join the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, a board spokesperson said Thursday.
“Ramsey Arnold left the Board on September 21,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “He will be working for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). DNFSB will back-fill one of the vacant resident inspector positions at Pantex shortly.”
Arnold had worked at DNFSB for almost 10 years by the time he left the board, according to his LinkedIn profile. It was his longest stretch of employment since he obtained his masters degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the profile.
The IAEA in Vienna, Austria, did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday.
Arnold’s departure leaves Zachery Beauvais as the sole DNFSB inspector on site at Pantex: the Amarillo, Texas, complex that assembles and disassembles nuclear weapons that need to be serviced for future deployment, or dismantled for parts.
Unlike most DNFSB staff, who only visit DOE nuclear sites occasionally, field inspectors live and work nearby the sites they are charged with overseeing. The inspectors are the boards boots on the ground, looking out for potential safety hazards across the nuclear security enterprise and legacy weapon sites being cleaned up by DOE’s environmental management office.
Arnold exited not long after the DNFSB announced a since-prohibited reorganization that would have slashed the independent agency’s overall headcount, but boosted the number of inspectors stationed permanently at Department of Energy nuclear facilities such as Pantex.
A funding bill signed into law in September forbade the DNFSB from using funds appropriated for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 to execute a board-approved reduction of full-time staff to about 80 from the current 100 or so heads. The reorganization Congress blocked also would have increased the board’s total number of resident-inspector jobs to 18 from the current 10.
There are six field inspectors listed on the DNFSB’s website now, though another two were slated to join the agency in August. The spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment about whether the other two inspectors had reported to the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., as the board said they would.
