Senior Advisor to Moniz ‘Dubious’ About Incentivizing Safety Culture in Contracts

As the Department of Energy wrestles with revamping its management and operating contracting strategy, increasing an emphasis on nuclear safety while cutting back on fee, it doesn’t appear likely to take a cue from Bechtel’s Waste Treatment Plant contract. The WTP contract sought to incentivize safety culture on the project, but Bruce Held, a senior advisor to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, said yesterday at the Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum that he was “dubious” about incentivizing nuclear safety. “Relegating nuclear safety to the status of one of several performance metrics risks incentivizing in a costly and counterproductive fashion exactly the kind of tradeoffs between nuclear safety and nuclear mission that [Navy] Adm. [Hyman] Rickover recognized long ago was so unwise,” Held said. “I believe our governing contracts must recognize nuclear safety as a ‘sine qua non,’ a core value without which DOE’s nuclear mission cannot succeed.”