The Department of Energy should better protect workers at the Savannah River Site’s tritium facilities from accidents that could deliver high doses of radiation, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) recommended Wednesday.
The board said in a new safety recommendation that DOE workers, and the public at large, could be imperiled by “energetic accidents”: fires, falling cranes, or even explosions that might release large quantities of radioactive tritium gas, “creating the potential for acute radiation sickness or fatality.”
Savannah River’s tritium facilities are, for now, the campus’ main contribution to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) active nuclear weapons programs. The facilities at the Aiken, S.C., site process tritium gas: a radioactive hydrogen isotope that boosts the explosive yield of nuclear weapons. Tritium facilities at Savannah River include: the 217–H Vault; Buildings 233–H and 234–H; and the Tritium Extraction Facility.
To mitigate the risks of a contamination spread that could overwhelm site and local emergency-response personnel, the DNFSB recommended that DOE consider reducing the amount of people and tritium present at the facilities at any given time.
The DNFSB also recommended the NNSA “[i]dentify and implement long-term actions and controls to prevent or mitigate the hazards that pose significant radiological consequences to acceptably low values consistent with the requirements of DOE directives.” It should also “evaluate the adequacy of the following safety management programs and upgrade them as necessary to ensure that SRS can effectively respond to energetic accidents at the Tritium Facilities.”
The defense board shared a draft of the tritium recommendation earlier this year with the Energy Department. NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty responded to the draft in a March 12 letter to DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton, writing that “[t]he Department believes that actions contained in the Draft Recommendation 2019-1 are already in place or in development to continue the improvements to provide adequate protection of Tritium Facilities workers, the environment, and the public.”
The tritium safety recommendation is only the second recommendation the DNFSB has made to the secretary of energy during the Donald Trump administration. The first concerned potential accidents at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
The White House and DNFSB have clashed over the independent federal board’s legal authority to oversee DOE workers; the department says those personnel are out of bounds for the board, and the board says they are not. The Energy Department says its workers are solely its responsibility, but the DNFSB says the actions of DOE personnel can easily affect members of the public outside of a site’s borders.
Congress created the DNFSB in 1988 and empowered the five-member board to write health and safety recommendations for DOE’s active and former defense nuclear sites, except for naval nuclear reactor sites. The roughly $30-million-a-year agency does not regulate DOE, which is its own regulator, but it may issue safety recommendations with which the secretary of energy must publicly agree or disagree.
