nuclear-news

Largely unknown to the general public, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is a small organization, but it has played a critical role in dragging the US nuclear weapons complex away from decades of operating outside the mainstream of nuclear safety practice. With an annual budget of $31 million, the board oversees safety at 10 Energy Department sites that employ 110,000 people and occupy a land base larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. These sites store and handle some of the world largest and potentially most dangerous inventories of nuclear materials. Since its inception the board has been largely responsible, among other things, for:

• 
  Removing and safely packaging large amounts of unsafe nuclear explosive materials from several sites.
• Reducing explosion and fire hazards, a dominant concern.
• Increasing emergency planning and response to major nuclear accidents.
• Upgrading antiquated safety systems at nuclear facilities.

Despite this record of achievement, the board now faces difficulties that include the actions of some if its own members, who either don’t want or can’t seem to execute its mission. Last year, Sean Sullivan, the acting chairman installed at the request of Senate Republicans, tried to secretly convince the Trump White House to get rid of the board entirely, claiming it was “a relic of the Cold-War era defense-establishment.” Sullivan failed and was compelled to resign after his effort was revealed to the public.

As he attempted to eliminate the safety board, Sullivan also created a “secondary proposal” that would impose deep staffing cuts; outlined in a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, this fallback proposal was meant to go into effect if efforts to terminate the board went nowhere. The new acting chair of the safety board, Bruce Hamilton (also selected by Senate Republicans), unveiled the secondary proposal on August 15. The plan would “restructure by reducing the size of the workforce and relocating most of the technical staff to defense nuclear sites. This restructuring would reduce agency employees by at least 32 percent, down to 82 from the current 120.”

Although the restructuring plan has some positive elements—notably an addition of inspectors in the field—the deep budget and staff cut could disrupt and cripple the safety board’s effectiveness. Contention among board members is a symptom of crisis that has led to a loss of staff morale and high turnover. More than 60 percent of its technical staffers have left in less than the last four years. In May, the inspector general who oversees the safety board reported that it was ranked last by employees of 28 small federal agencies in terms a being a desirable place to work. According to the inspector general, more than a third of the safety staff surveyed in 2017 planned to leave, largely because of a “stark disagreement among board members, on how and when [safety] reporting requirements should be issued.” According to the inspector general, “two board members [Sullivan and Hamilton] routinely disapproved staff reports that included reporting requirements and instead proposed amendments to remove the reporting requirements.”

The restructuring plan cannot be considered in isolation from the Trump administration’s aggressive dismantlement of oversight across the government, especially in light of the Energy Department’s constantly stumbling efforts to build new nuclear weapons at its antiquated facilities. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that US nuclear weapons laboratories and supporting activities will cost $261 billion over the next three decades. The board’s restructuring plan is expected to begin by October 18 of this year and follows the Trump administration’s playbook of slashing safety oversight in federal agencies, as has happened with the Chemical Safety Board, responsible for investigating industrial chemical accidents. Unless Congress intervenes, the restructuring of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board will proceed.

Safety and conflict in the nuclear weapons complex. Unlike the commercial nuclear power industry, which consists of a relatively small number of reactor designs, the nuclear weapons complex includes a host of one-of-a-kind facilities, many built 50 to 70-plus years ago. Over the decades, each Energy Department site in the complex has created its own unique culture, shaped by secrecy, isolation, and demands of the Cold War nuclear arms race. Since making the most dangerous weapons in the world involves working with some of the world’s most dangerous materials, the employees in the nuclear weapons complex need a high degree of protection against workplace exposure to radiation and toxic materials. The United States is already paying a stiff price for the harm caused to the workers who made nuclear weapons through the 1980s. To date, 120,599 deceased and sick nuclear weapons workers have been paid $15.37 billion in compensation and medical care.

Via a semi-autonomous subunit known as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Energy Department manages the US nuclear weapons complex in an unusual manner. In the complex, private contractors control at least 10 times more employees than federal managers. And unlike the rest of the government, the Energy Department self-regulates its workplace safety performance, primarily through a system of “orders” that are not on their own legally binding, but rather are enforced as requirements in contracts with private companies. With its origins in what the US Governmental Accountability Office has described as an “undocumented policy of blind faith in its contractor’s performance,” this regime is largely dependent on an honor system, in which contractors are expected to self-report their safety problems. ………

Though the Cold War is long over, the Energy Department’s antiquated, contractor-dominated management system—in which safety goal posts are easily moved behind closed doors—continues to endure and, in some cases, thrive. Without the meaningful oversight of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the nuclear weapons complex will predictably march back to a time, in the no-so-distant past, when public and worker safety was an afterthought—with serious consequences. https://thebulletin.org/2018/08/under-siege-safety-in-the-nuclear-weapons-complex/