Are moves planned to hobble nuclear safety board access?
Something is going on with the independent board that oversees safety issues at the nation’s weapons facilities. People keep trying to kill it off or change it or push it away.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was created by Congress in 1988 to, as a history of the DNFB posted on its website says, “provide advice and recommendations to the secretary of energy regarding public health and safety at the defense nuclear facilities managed by the Department of Energy.”
As part of that role, the presidentially appointed DNFSB has become the main source of public information on the nitty-gritty details of what goes on behind the security fences of DOE facilities like Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Its inspectors provide brief reports, weekly or monthly, about safety issues at the weapons labs, and the board issues longer, more detailed reports and recommendations
from time to time. Some DNFSB findings have become the basis for news reports about LANL.
Board information spurred a Journal story about shortcomings in LANL’s handling of simulations of potential disasters like an earthquake or an active shooter. Also making the news was the DNFSB’s taking note of various workplace safety issues, including putting too much plutonium in enclosed spaces (which, worst case scenario, can cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction) and leaks of radioactive material.
In other words, the DNFSB has been doing what it’s supposed to do, and newspapers have reported on that.
Over the past year, there have been efforts to change or even get rid of the DNFSB. Dealing with the board can apparently be a hassle for the weapons labs and their contract operators, and the safety board’s reports sometimes generate bad news.
In 2017, the DNFSB’s then-chairman proposed that the agency be dissolved as a relic of the Cold War and duplicative of the safety efforts by DOE’s own National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the labs. The chairman, part of the five-member board’s Republican minority, quit after the proposal failed to gain traction.
Now there are two new developments.
The current acting chairman, also a Republican, proposed cutting the board’s headquarters staff by 46 percent, but with an increase to the DNFSB’s field inspector staff from 10 to 18. He says cutting staff from 102 to 56 plus the five board members will remove “overlapping layers” that are hindering the flow of information to board members, and that having more people in the field “seeing what’s actually going on” is a better use of resources.
Two of three Democrats on the board joined in approving reorganization in a recent vote (the fifth board slot, the former chair’s position, remains unfilled).
But dissenting board member Joyce Connery said in written comments that the “sweeping change” of the staff reduction is arbitrary, there has been no analysis of how the DNFSB will continue to meet its statutory duties with the staff cuts and the board has yet to receive the results of a $250,000 study on how to improve its effectiveness.
New DOE rule
Perhaps more impactful is a new DOE order that appears to reduce the DNFSB’s oversight role, and put restrictions on communications between DOE facilities and the safety board.
The order has language that suggests lab worker safety is not an issue for DNFSB oversight, or at least not an issue when the DOE says there’s no threat to general public health and safety, which it defines as health and safety beyond the boundaries of a nuclear facility.
The order sets out that the DOE can deny DNFSB access to information that is “pre-decisional or otherwise privileged” and establishes protocols for communications with the safety board to ensure DOE “speaks with one voice.”
Whereas the DNFSB is taking the ax to bureaucracy, for better or worse, the DOE order appears to embrace the hoops and obstacles of bureaucratic “layers.”
Pit production
All of this fuss about whether the DNFSB is too fat or too intrusive or too burdensome comes as the nuclear weapons complex, and specifically the Los Alamos lab, is tasked with ramping up production of the plutonium cores of nuclear weapons, called “pits,” to 80 a year by 2030.
Thousands of pits were made during the Cold War, but none has been produced since 2011, when LANL completed the last of 29 for submarine missiles.
A big problem for the public in all this is that, really, no one tells us anything. That’s the way it goes with a lot of the federal government, especially in the sphere of weapons-making.
The Department of Defense wants the DOE to make 80 plutonium pits a year to modernize the U.S. arsenal, while thousands of pits made years ago are in storage. This work will cost (literally) untold billions.
Is there any kind of public forum that fleshes out why making more pits is a good idea and why the old pits are unacceptable, and how much it will cost to make new ones? No.
The DFSNB, tasked with protecting the public in matters nuclear, decides to make a major cut in staff. Trimming bureaucracy may well be a great idea, and having more field inspectors certainly is, but a beforethe-fact public discussion would have been appropriate for an agency with such an important task.
Yes, nuclear secrets must be kept. But that doesn’t mean the agencies in charge of making weapons or making sure that it’s done in a safe way get a pass on transparency.
If in fact the country is going to have a weaker Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, those behind the changes should own it, and come out and tell us why. If that’s not the goal, then the powers that be should do a better job of letting us all know why we shouldn’t be skeptical.