The U.S. Department of Energy has doubled down in the new year on its refusal to accept a safety recommendation from the Defense Nuclear Faciliites Safety Board (DNFSB) regarding tritium facilities at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
“[T]he Savannah River Tritium Enterprise (SRTE) provides adequate protection of the public and worker safety,” Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of DOE’s semiautnomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), wrote in a Jan. 3 letter to DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton. “DOE/NNSA concludes that we are providing adequate protection to the public and the workers at SRTE.”
The DNFSB published the letter on its website last week. The missive marks the second time DOE has rejected board recommendation 2019-2, effectively ending, for now, the recommendation’s chance of affecting change to this particular part of Savannah River’s mission. The letter also marks the latest confrontation over DNFSB jurisdiction at Energy Department sites.
The DNFSB issued recommendation 2019-2 last summer. The board advised DOE to bolster its emergency response capabilities against possible widespread tritium contamination at Savannah River.
Tritium is a radioactive hydrogen isotope used in nuclear weapons. The Energy Department, in rejecting recommendation 2019-2, said its emergency response capabilities at Savannah River are adequate, in part because planning for tritium exposure assumes what DOE characterizes as a highly unlikely worst-case scenario involving all the tritium on site.
On the jurisdictional end of things, the DNFSB, an independent federal group with a roughly $30-million annual budget, says it alone has the power to determine whether DOE is adequately protecting the public from the various hazards of active and shuttered defense nuclear sites.
The Energy Department, since the early days of the Donald Trump administration, has said the DNFSB has no jurisdiction over defense-nuclear facilities that the agency deems less hazardous, or over the employees who work in such facilities.
