The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has lost its game of chicken with the Pantex Plant in Texas, where personnel recently blocked a board inspector from attending a meeting of the secretive Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group, according to a letter posted online.
An employee for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) blocked the inspector, on the grounds that allowing attendance would violate the controversial DOE Order 140.1, according to an April 16 letter from DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton to Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette. The 2018 rule, whicn Brouillette helped write when he was deputy secretary of energy, instructs agency employees and contractors not to share certain information with the Defense Nuclear Safety Board without permission from DOE headquarters.
Hamilton has already read DOE the riot act over Order 140.1, which the board says is incompatible with the 1988 federal law that created the DNFSB, and empowers it to act as a health and safety watchdog for active and shuttered defense-nuclear sites.
In October, Hamilton told Brouillette in another letter that the board “directed our staff to attend all phases of the NES [nuclear explosive safety] study process.”
Evidently, the board could not lever its way in.
“The NNSA Chair of a nuclear explosive safety (NES) change evaluation prohibited our Resident Inspector from observing the deliberation phase of the evaluation at the Pantex Plant on April 13, 2020,” Hamilton wrote last week. “In an email dated April 13, 2020, the NNSA Chair stated that the ‘decision was based on DOE O 140.1 compliance.'”
Hamilton complained that the NNSA employee’s move ran afoul of language in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that requires the Energy Department to provide the DNFSB with “prompt and unfettered access to such facilities, personnel, and information as the Board considers necessary.”
Nuclear explosive safety studies led by the Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group are gatherings of technical experts, including federal staff from the three Energy Department nuclear weapons laboratories, the Pantex weapons assembly and disassembly plant, and the Nevada National Security Site. Also represented are the prime contractors for Pantex and the Nevada National Security Site, as well as officials from NNSA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Whenever a nuclear weapon has to be serviced, the Nuclear Explosive Safety Study Group vets the service procedure, which the lab responsible for the weapon provides.
The Energy Department has revised Order 140.1, though it has not shared the text of that update. Hamilton, writing for the board in late February, told Brouillette a draft revision had satisfied the DNFSB’s legal concerns. However, the watchdog wanted an addition memorandum of understanding between the two agencies to clarify issues including the board’s access to DOE facilities and personnel. A DNFSB spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday on the matter.
