nuclear-news

A small government safety organization tasked with protecting the workers who construct America’s nuclear arsenal and with preventing radioactive disasters in the communities where they live is under new siege in Washington.

The Trump administration, acting in an open partnership with the profit-making contractors that control the industrial sites where U.S. nuclear bombs are made and stored, has enacted new rules that limit the authority and reach of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, created by Congress in 1988 amid broad public concerns over civil and military nuclear safety lapses.

The administration’s new rules eliminate the board’s authority to oversee workplace protections for roughly 39,000 nuclear workers and also block its unfettered access to nearly three-quarters of the nuclear weapons-related sites that it can now inspect.

In a separate move, the board’s new acting Republican chairman has proposed to put more inspectors in the field but to cut its overall staff by nearly a third, including letting some of its supporting technical experts in Washington go. The board already has one of the smallest oversight staffs of any federal agency.

The twin assaults on the operations and authority of the safety board come just as the Energy Department, acting at President Trump’s direction, is embarking on the most aggressive era of nuclear weapons production since the Cold War. Trump has called for one new nuclear bomb to be produced immediately and for the production of another new bomb to be studied.

The moves against the board also come at the end of a three-year hiatus in the U.S. production of plutonium cores for nuclear warheads, forced in part by the five-member board’s worries about workplace conditions that might cause a cataclysmic safety accident at one of the key U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The production and maintenance of such weapons is financed by the Department of Energy, and its deputy secretary, Dan Brouillette, a former Ford Motor Company executive and Republican congressional staff member, has testified that the new directive “does not hinder” the board’s work.
But one of the board’s Democratic members, Joyce Connery, has said “this seems to be the perfect storm for accidents to happen, and this is a time where we should be doubling down on our efforts on nuclear safety.”

Even the board’s acting Republican chair, former Navy officer Bruce Hamilton, who proposed Aug. 13 to trim the board’s overall staff by 32 percent, to 79 from 117, has said the DOE’s directive goes too far. It is, he said at a special board hearing about it on Aug. 28, “a subtle attempt to say that the board doesn’t get to decide” when its intervention in a potential nuclear weapons safety problem is necessary.

Members of the board’s technical staff have already complained that under the new DOE directive, they have been blocked from gaining access to safety data at key nuclear facilities that they could regularly review in the past, according to testimony at the hearing by Chris Roscetti, the board’s technical director.

………The DOE directive was developed without input from the safety board, unions representing contractor employees at the weapons sites, and communities near those sites, according to testimony at the hearing by Matthew Moury, the Energy Department’s associate undersecretary responsible for worker and public safety. When asked by a board member if contractors were consulted, he said he could not recall.
………A safety board staff analysis, described at the hearing, showed that that the restriction on inspections would render off-limits 71 percent of all buildings currently routinely open to inspection by the safety board’s staff. These would include DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the New Mexico installation that serves as the nation’s only permanent repository for waste created in the making of nuclear weapons. It is still recovering from a series of accidents in February 2014 that included a radiation leak—triggered by a mishandled and mislabeled drum of waste that originated at Los Alamos—exposing 21 workers to what the Energy Department has deemed minor amounts of radiation. The cost of its recovery is expected to exceed $1 billion, with some estimates pushing $2 billion.
……… a Center for Public Integrity analysis of enforcement actions against contractors by the Energy Department between 2006 and 2016 showed the department had completely waived or dramatically reduced 19 out of 21 major fines for safety breaches and other workplace violations. The department’s forgiving nature eliminated about 46 percent—$3.3 million—of the $7.3 million in total fines contractors could have faced over that period. The Department of Energy occupies dual roles that at times conflict, as the taskmaster responsible for improving productivity by its contractors and the regulator responsible for protecting workers and the public from health risks associated with the nuclear weapon sites……..https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-administration-muzzles-nuclear-weapons-safety-watchdog

……..The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, investigative newsroom in Washington. More of its work can be found here.