WASHINGTON — The Department of Energy is revising a controversial order that curtailed the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s access to defense nuclear sites and personnel, and the agency plans to brief the board this month, the Secretary of Energy told lawmakers here Tuesday.
“It’s being revised,”Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said of Order 140.1 in a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, after a question from Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “I will be meeting with the DNFSB [Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board] later this month and we hope to have it completely resolved.”
Brouillette, who helped roll out Order 140.1, stuck to the legal argument he has used since the agency issued the order in 2018: that the directive is meant to “clearly define the roles of the DNFSB versus the Department of Energy, who is the regulator for these nuclear matters. [T]he DNFSB in our opinion, and I think in accordance with the statute, is an advisory board.”
The DNFSB disagrees with that legal take, maintaining that the board alone has discretion to decide what information it requires from DOE in order to judge whether defense-nuclear activities inside an agency site might pose a hazard to members of the public outside that site.
Congress created the board in 1988 to protect the public from the hazards of active and shuttered defense nuclear sites, except those operated by the Naval Reactors program. DOE believes that it may, under that law, exclude from DNFSB oversight some facilities that DOE believes cannot threaten the public.
“At no point did we seek [through Order 140.1] to deny DNFSB access to a DOE facility, or access to the materials they need to actual advise us,” Brouillette said.
DNFSB is not so sure about that.
Last year, the board reported that some of its technical inspectors had been barred from meetings of the Nuclear Explosives Safety Group at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Since DOE issued 140.1, Heinrich has taken up the torch for DNFSB, inserting language into the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that requires DOE to give DNFSB “prompt and unfettered access to defense nuclear sites.”
“I think all of us can agree that nothing’s more important at our national labs than assuring the safety of the people who work there, and the public surrounding them,” Heinrich said at Tuesday’s hearing.
