WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Energy is still pursuing a potentially illegal policy of curtailing Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) oversight of certain nuclear-weapon sites, a board member said during a meeting Monday.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board 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 capabilities and safety practices at NNSA tritium facilities at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
Board member Joyce Connery said that she feared the Energy Department rejected recommendation 2019-2 based on its Order 140.1, which says any nuclear facility or activity that DOE says poses no threat to public health is out of bounds for DNFSB oversight.
In a 2018 letter to DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton, Undersecretary of Energy for Science Paul Dabbar said the board had to drop its recommendations about the tritium facilities for jurisdictional reasons. Connery seized on that stance Monday, reminding an audience packed with DOE staff that the agency has “stated explicitly that if we put forward a recommendation on the tritium facility that it wouldn’t be accepted by the Department.”
But a senior NNSA official at the meeting reiterated the department’s position that it had rejected recommendation 2019-2 because the agency believes it is already adequately protecting the public from a potential tritium release.
“[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 repeated the 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.
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.