In an effort to increase Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board oversight following the 2014 incidents at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, yesterday in Carlsbad, N.M., the Board approved a proposal that would increase DNFSB staff reviews at several Department of Energy sites. The Board does not have on-site representatives at the WIPP, Idaho, Nevada, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia sites, but yesterday backed a plan to produce monthly written reports from those sites and quarterly onsite reviews. The events at WIPP highlighted the need to increase the DNFSB’s effectiveness at sites without a permanent representative, Board Member Sean Sullivan told WC Monitor at the meeting. “The bottom line is, we exist as an agency to advise the [DOE] Secretary so that he doesn’t have nuclear accidents, and they had a nuclear accident,” he said. “We need to make sure that in addition to insisting that the Department of Energy does better, we owe it to the taxpayer to insist that we do all that we can.”
At yesterday’s public hearing in Carlsbad, which included testimony from DOE and contractor officials, DNFSB staff highlighted the Board’s work at WIPP. “The absence of a site representative at WIPP diminished our ability to observe WIPP operations closely and to detect negative trends that could result in unsafe conditions. Expectations for additional oversight at DOE sites without a site representative were not clearly established,” Carter Shuffler of the Board staff said. He also noted that in recent years the DNFSB noted several issues at WIPP that later were found to have contributed to the 2014 events, including letters to DOE on concerns with integrated safety management, the fire hazard analysis and the WIPP maintenance program.
DNFSB staff has developed a corrective action plan for the Board that includes risk ranking the documented safety analyses at the sites without DNFSB representatives, along with a monthly written report from those sites and two weeks of programmatic onsite reviews from each site each quarter. It also has developed a work plan for WIPP for the rest of the fiscal year. That plan includes reviews of WIPP’s development of revised safety related documents, the evaluation of nuclear safety systems and the evaluation of safety management programs.
Jobs