The head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will attend a Nov. 28 public hearing about a controversial agency order the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) fears will limit its access to defense-nuclear sites across the country.
Anne Marie White, assistant secretary for environmental management, accepted the invitation on or around Tuesday of this week, according to a letter that day from acting DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton.
“Your portion of the hearing should last no more than one hour,” Hamilton wrote.
The DNFSB said it is also open to having one manager of an Environmental Management’s field office attend the hearing. The board will conduct the hearing, and Chris Roscetti, DNFSB’s technical director, will also testify. Another panel will involve separatem, yet-unidentified stakeholders.
The scheduled hearing will be the second the DNFSB has held on the controversial DOE Order 140.1, which was released in May and sharply limits which official information the agency shares with the board, and who whom the agency shares that information. The Energy Department says the order will allow it to speak with “one voice” to the board.
The DNFSB estimates the order would choke off board access to some 70 percent of the Department of Energy defense-nuclear sites it now inspects. Board officials also fear the order would give Energy Department personnel and contractors a reason to bar DNFSB field inspectors from on-site meetings, on the pretext that information discussed in such sessions might be “pre-decisional”: a category of information the May order categorically protects the Department of Energy from disclosing to the board.
The Environmental Management office’s Cold War weapon-cleanup work sometimes overlaps geographically, though not contractually, with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) active stockpile stewardship and weapons modernization initiatives. The cleanup office and NNSA are bunkmates at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Site, and the Savannah River Site. Only at Savannah River, where the NNSA processes tritium for insertion into nuclear weapons, is the Environmental Management office the site landlord.
NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty has yet to appear before or correspond publicly with the board about Order 140.1. In August, the first time DNFSB invited Energy officials to testify about the order, William “Ike” White, Gordon-Hagerty’s acting deputy, appeared alongside Matthew Moury, DOE’s associate undersecretary for environment, health, safety, and securiy, for a protracted question-and-answer session with the four-member board.
Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette also appeared at the August DNFSB hearing, but he did not take any questions from the board.
