WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Energy might still be pursuing a potentially illegal policy of curtailing Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) oversight of certain nuclear-weapon sites, a board member said this week.
The DNFSB held the meeting to quiz DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officials about their reasoning for rejecting a board recommendation to improve emergency response and safety practices at NNSA tritium facilities at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Board member Joyce Connery said she fears the Energy Department rejected recommendation 2019-2 because of DOE Order 140.1: an agency directive published in 2018 that says any nuclear facility or activity the department deems harmless to public health is not subject to DNFSB jurisdiction.
In a 2018 letter addressing an early draft of recommendation 2019-2, Paul Dabbar, DOE’s undersecretary for science, told to DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton that the board had to drop any recommendations about Savannah River tritium facilities for jurisdictional reasons.
Connery seized on Dabbar’s stance Monday, reminding an audience packed with DOE staff that the department has “stated explicitly that if we put forward a recommendation on the tritium facility that it wouldn’t be accepted.”
Tritium is a radioactive hydrogen isotope that boosts the power of nuclear weapons. It decays over time and must be replaced periodically. At Savannah River, NNSA personnel fill up fresh tritium reservoirs with gas brought in from off-site. If the gas binds with oxygen, as a result of a fire, for example, the oxygenated compound could spread by air through Savannah River and pose a hazard to those exposed to it.
A senior NNSA official at the meeting reiterated the agency’s position that it rejected recommendation 2019-2 because, in the agency’s opinion, the public is adequately protected from a potential tritium release at Savannah River.
“[T]o accept the recommendation would have accepted the premise that we are not providing adequate protection,” said James McConnell, associate administrator for safety, infrastructure, and operations at NNSA headquarters in Washington. “We rejected that premise, therefore we rejected the recommendation.”
McConnell also repeated the specific reasons DOE cited when it formally rejected the order. Among these: the tritium facilities are in a relatively remote part of the vast Savannah River Site, and the calculations the NNSA uses to determine the maximum exposure to an individual are an extreme worst-case scenario that involves an unlikely dispersal of the entire tritium inventory.
the DNFSB formally transmitted recommendation 2019-2 in June. The Energy Department in August rejected the recommendation, the first time it has done so in the board’s roughly 30-year history.
This week, Hamilton appeared to accept that the NNSA had not rejected recommendation 2019-2 because of Order 140.1. However, the DNFSB boss remained unequivocal that the Energy Department has no legal role in determining whether there is “adequate protection” for the public at DOE sites.
“Congress declines to provide an objective definition of adequate protection, instead deferring to the collective wisdom of this board,” Hamilton said at the meeting.
Hamilton did not support recommendation 2019-2, saying in a closing statement that he has “a higher tolerance” for risk at Savannah River than his colleagues, and that workers there are far removed from the public and operate without much more risk than workers in other industries. However, with two of the three serving board members voting in favor of 2019-2, the recommendation made it up to the Forrestal Building for Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s consideration, anyway.
With 2019-2 officially rejected, the DNFSB will either reaffirm the recommendation or revise it and resubmit it to DOE. The board had not done either of those things at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. In either case, the Energy Department would get another chance to either accept or reject the recommendation: a decision the agency must publish in the Federal Register.
Congress created the DNFSB is 1988 to make safety recommendations for current and former defense nuclear sites, except for naval reactor sites, to help DOE ensure “adequate protection” of the public. The board says this authority also gives it the right to make recommendations that involve DOE personnel, whether those employees are working on a nuclear mission or merely co-located with personnel who are.