New Mexico senators speak out on nuclear safety board order
By Rebecca Moss | rmoss@sfnewmexican.com
New Mexico’s U.S. senators are asking Congress to block a Department of Energy order that would limit a federal board’s access to information about nuclear facilities and could hinder its ability to oversee worker health and safety.
In a letter sent Wednesday to the leaders of a Senate appropriations subcommittee, Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall also ask their colleagues to block impending staff cuts and a broad reorganization at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. New Mexico is home to three of the 14 nuclear facilities under the board’s jurisdiction: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
“We feel strongly that these two matters facing the [safety board] and its future must be suspended while Congress and the public have time to review and offer constructive feedback” on how to maintain and improve the board, the senators wrote to Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chairman and ranking member of the energy and water development subcommittee.
Spokespeople for Alexander and Feinstein said their senators were still reviewing the proposal. Both senators have large nuclear facilities in their states.
The nuclear safety board, which falls under the subcommittee’s jurisdiction, was established in 1988 to provide additional oversight and transparency to the Department of Energy’s largely self-regulating nuclear complexes, which were plagued by contamination and negligent safety practices.
The board reviews incidents and near-misses, and it provides safety recommendations and advice to the energy secretary. But there have been efforts to hamper the board, and over the last year, it has faced a series of attacks on its independence and very existence, even from its own leadership.
Last summer the board’s then-chairman suggested his agency be dissolved, calling it a relic of the Cold War. And a few months later, the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees nuclear facilities, proposed eliminating written weekly reports on safety issues at the labs to avoid public scrutiny. Neither of these proposals were adopted.
This month, the board approved a plan to slash staff at its Washington headquarters, which would be partially offset by increasing the number of inspectors working at national laboratories and nuclear plants. The measure was approved by three of the four board members. Board member Joyce Connery wrote in her dissenting vote that the public should have had an opportunity to weigh in on the plan, which it did not.
On Tuesday, the board convened a hearing with officials from the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration to discuss the new order limiting the board’s access to information. Board members criticized the order, saying it appears to contradict the U.S. Atomic Energy Act.
Board members said neither they nor workers nor members of the public were formally consulted on the order, and it has already prevented them from accessing safety information at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas.
Energy officials said the order is intended to update a 17-year-old guideline for how the Department of Energy and the board should interact.
But Udall and Heinrich said Thursday that neither action should have moved forward without “real consultation with Congress.” They are asking that the board’s next public hearing on the order take place in New Mexico next month.
At a campaign event in Santa Fe this month, Heinrich said the order was among “a whole series of policy decisions by this administration that frankly weren’t even in their best long-term interest.”
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/new-mexico-senators-speak-out-on-nuclear-safety-board-order/article_446add7f-b6e5-54d8-a8ce-5084cfff6688.html
6 comments:
This whole drama could be solved by dissolving the DNFSB. The ~115 DNFSB workers and $30M DNFSB annual budget could be used to upgrade aging facilities or using these federal employees as Cognizant System Engineers (CSEs) at the Labs which the Labs consistently do a poor job of staffing. The current product of the DNFSB are a 1-page weekly report for each DOE nuclear facility that provides no (zero) value.
"each DOE nuclear facility that provides no (zero) value."
It is of 30M for the 115 DNFSB workers. I thought this organization was just a scam to reward retired people with a nice cushy job for with lots of pay for no work.
The DNFSB has been a self-serving, ongoing distaster since their inception. They are worse than worthless. They are actively and arrogantly counterproductive. Disbanding them is a step in the right direction. Of course then many of their members might be forced to work for a living.
You can certainly argue that the DNFSB made some positive contributions in its early years. The first Board members were talented and experienced enough to know when to speak up and when to be quiet, and there were some actual issues of note in the Complex to deal with. In the intervening years, the Board has pretty much degenerated into a carping irrelevancy with much less experienced, technical capability. In the last 10 - 15 years, it has impeded the solving of actual issues more than it has helped. I would agree that it has outlived its usefulness.
September 2, 2018 at 5:44 PM
Excellent summary of the situation. If DNFSB stays than they need to completely change who is on it. The lack of talent is rather stunning and the who thing is just a way to make easy money for doing very little or even less than nothing in some cases.
"If DNFSB stays than they need to completely change who is on it. The lack of talent is rather stunning and the who thing is just a way to make easy money for doing very little or even less than nothing in some cases."
The same could be said for the liberal arts majors that populate the NNSA local field offices, and how that "is just a way to make easy money for doing very little" for LLNS. Clearly the NNSA recognized the no value added for-profit model when the contract to run LANL moved to a lower flat fee structure. It becomes problematic for a for profit contractor to build a high performance award fee narrative with their field office, when outside party poopers like the DNFSB or to a lesser extent, the DOE Office of Assessment, can chime in on safety matters. When outsider agencies raise contractor safety concerns, especially when they are made public, field offices risk their own credibility if they do not fold in those safety matters into the annual award fee calculation.
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