With the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration having moved to eliminate some burdensome requirements from its directives, a senior NNSA official suggested yesterday that it was now time for DOE contractors to put the less prescriptive requirements to good use. DOE’s Office of Health, Safety and Security has spearheaded much of the directives review and began taking a look at 107 directives that deal with safety and security. “We have to do a lot of work and it’s unfortunately a very heavy lift to get just a relatively small amount of prescription taken out of some of our directives,” Jim McConnell, the NNSA’s Assistant Deputy Administrator for Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Operations and Governance Reform, told the Energy Facility Contractors Group at a meeting in Washington yesterday. “But all that does is unlock for you the opportunity to then take that reduced prescription or increased flexibility, however you want to look at it, and put it to good use. You’re the ones that have to come up with new and innovative and more effective ways to approach the work outside the previous constraints that end up being more efficient, more productive and more cost effective.”
McConnell also suggested that the Department and its contractors needed to start developing data and measures that demonstrate the benefits of reducing some requirements to prevent requirements from creeping back in response to an incident in the future. “If we don’t have that set of data as the counterweight to, ‘well, you relaxed your requirements and therefore something bad happened,’ we will have a very difficult time resisting the pressure to revert back to our old ways or perhaps even go further than that,” McConnell said.
