The U.S. Department of Energy rejected a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) recommendation intended to better protect workers at the Savannah River Site’s tritium facilities from fires, explosions, and other accidents that could expose the public to radiation.
In doing so, DOE and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) also rejected the independent agency’s conclusion that the South Carolina site’s emergency-response capabilities might not be able to “effectively respond” to accidents at the tritium facilities.
“DOE/NNSA remains fully compliant and committed in our duties to the American public in the safe operation of these facilities,” NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty wrote in a Sept. 10 letter that the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board only recently posted online. “Therefore, I do not accept Recommendation 2019-2.”
This is the first time in the 30-year history of the DNFSB that the Department of Energy has rejected a recommendation entirely, a board spokesperson said by email Friday.
Now, “we are at the point where the Board either reaffirms its original recommendation or makes a revised recommendation,” the spokesperson wrote. Once the board decides on its course and notifies the DOE of its choice, the Energy Department will have 30 days to either accept or reject the recommendation – and the secretary of energy will have to publish the decision in the Federal Register.
The NNSA, which manages the Energy Department’s nuclear stockpile work, operates the tritium facilities at Savannah River.
The agency harvests and processes tritiuim, a radioactive hydrogen isotope that increases the explosive power of nuclear weapons, at the Savannah River Site’s 217–H Vault; Buildings 233–H and 234–H; and the Tritium Extraction Facility. The NNSA generates the isotope in a Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power reactor, then trucks the material to Savannah River, where it is retrieved and placed in reservoirs — small, metal gas tanks — that are later inserted into nuclear weapons at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Tritium decays relatively rapidly, so weapons reservoirs must regularly be replaced. Less regularly, tritium-harvesting infrastructure can be replaced, as the NNSA has proposed doing. In her letter, Gordon-Hagerty said a planned next-generation tritium plant “will fundamentally improve safety” at the Savannah River Site.
The NNSA has requested, and the House and Senate have agreed in draft spending bills to provide, $27 million for fiscal 2020 to begin designing what the agency calls the Tritium Finishing Facility (but which Congress, in official budget documents, cites as the Tritium Production Capability). The NNSA estimates the project — which is actually two facilities encompassing a new tritium processing building and a new deuterium processing building — would cost up to $550 million to build and switch on by the fall of 2031.
DNFSB Recommendation 2019-2, only the second of the Trump adminsitration, advised DOE and NNSA to better protect workers at Savannah River Site facilities from what the board called “energetic accidents”: fires, falling cranes, or even explosions that might release large quantities of radioactive tritium, “creating the potential for acute radiation sickness or fatality.”
The DNFSB has no regulatory authority over DOE or NNSA ‒ the Energy Department is its own regulator at defense-nuclear sites ‒ but it may make safety recommendations with which the agency must publicly agree or disagree.
The DNFSB and DOE have been at loggerheads over the limits of the board’s authority to inspect and oversee agency sites and workers since the beginning of the Donald Trump administration. In DOE Order 140.1, issued last year, the department moved to restrict the interactions between its employees and contractors and the DNFSB.
In the order, the agency claimed the board’s authority does not extend to activities DOE says have no effect on people outside of department sites. The DNFSB counters that not only could such activities threaten public health, but that DOE has no legal authority to pre-empt the board’s judgement in such matters.
Y-12 Criticality Meetings on Slate, Board Says
The three current members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board — the Donald Trump administration’s nominees to fill the two vacant seats have yet to get confirmation hearings in the Senate — are scheduled to meet next week with local federal officials and the management contractor at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
There, according to an agenda the board posted to its website this week, DNFSB members will get the briefings they requested on the uranium hub’s criticality safety program.
The DNFSB is scheduled to meet for 30 minutes on Tuesday with federal staff from the Tennessee branch of the NNSA Production Office, then with personnel representing site contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security for 90 minutes.
The board asked for the meetings after its resident inspector at Y-12 determined the contractor’s criticality safety program — the procedural guardrails for avoiding an accidental nuclear chain reaction — were inadequate, in part because the federal government has not watched its contractor at the site closely enough.
