August 30, 2018

Dear [Congressional colleagues],

You all probably have the important letter sent from the New Mexico senators yesterday. It requests that you --

• prohibit any funds from being used to support the proposed DNFSB reorganization, especially the proposed staff cut, and that you
  
• suspend DOE Order 140.1 
  

as you complete the FY19 Energy and Water Appropriations bill.

We fully concur with these timely and simple proposals, which are to the point.

We believe DOE Order 140.1 is not just ill-advised but illegal for reasons well-articulated in the August 28 hearing.

Today we wrote the Board suggesting that they ignore the subject Order to the best of their ability and meanwhile log every instance of resistance, time-wasting, and lack of access from DOE and its contractors, with names and dates and other specific information for submission to Congress, as examples of Atomic Energy Act violations which should not be allowed to continue. Your committees have an important role to play in this.

We are also concerned that the vote by the DNFSB Board to slash its own staff reflects declining expectations of agency performance on the part of the Board itself.

Congress has been too idle in protecting this agency, and now emergency action is warranted. The letter from the New Mexico delegation is an excellent start.

We also suggest that in DNFSB's enabling legislation, the words "and worker" should be inserted after the word "public" in the phrase "public health and safety" in the four places the latter phrase occurs, to clarify what has been so far 30 years of oversight.

We have collected our own formal comments and press releases, recent articles in the press, and other materials of interest here. A good overview was provided today by Robert Alvarez: "Under siege: Safety in the nuclear weapons complex," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Aug 30, 2018.

The Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee of the New Mexico Legislature is very interested in these issues. That Committee recently conducted a hearing in which DOE Order 140.1 and DNFSB staffing issues played an important part. Ms. Shawna Casebier, an attorney with the New Mexico Legislative Council Service, is copied here.

As was remarked at the August 28 DNFSB hearing by more than one Board member (and in press accounts afterward), the timing of DOE Order 140.1 could hardly be worse. DOE facilities are aging, just as dangerous new missions are being proposed. A "perfect storm" is at hand, in Board member Connery's words.

In the case of LANL, the operating contractor and NNSA are now boldly proposing nuclear facilities which admittedly will not meet current nuclear safety standards. They also appear, to my eye at least, to violate common building standards, to the point of future inoperability.

They have done this before more than once, and their projects have failed to get off the drawing board. In one case -- the Plutonium Storage Facility -- the building was completed but could never be used and had to be quietly torn down. In the case of the Radiological Laboratory, Utility, and Office Building (RLUOB), once a relatively "modest" building ($400 million, with equipment), the paint was hardly dry before a billion dollars in new equipment was proposed, and funded, to re-purpose the building.

The geotechnical and topographic limitations of LANL's TA-55 area, coupled with the age and original design of building PF-4, make it very difficult to expand the pit production mission, let alone to do so in an enduring fashion, i.e. beyond PF-4's lifetime. If current DOE safety standards were actually met, LANL couldn't take on the industrial pit mission.

Instead, the safety strategy for LANL’s proposed underground pit production modules would “rely solely on the passive confinement capability for accident mitigation and assumes that no active safety systems would be required” (Engineering Assessment, p. 2-43). Emergency fire water supply and electrical power for the modules “will not be designed, procured, or installed to nuclear codes and standards” (op. cit., p. 2-47). Production shifts would be shuttled in and out of cramped underground plutonium processing rooms through what appear to be very small locker rooms; there would be no “office areas, lunch/break room, restrooms, or operations and security control areas” (Ibid).

Meanwhile LANL and NNSA seek to acquire Hazard Category 3 nuclear facility space in the former RLUOB despite not having built the facility to nuclear standards. You should see a trend here.

Under Order 140.1, DOE would not apparently have to respond to design review by DNFSB of any of these facilities, because a) RLUOB is to become a HazCat 3 facility and b) even though the underground modules are to be HazCat 2, they are presumed to create no public health risks (being underground) and hence have no active safety-class systems to mitigate those risks.

We hope you will take decisive action to restore at least the very limited oversight of public and worker health and safety for defense nuclear facilities the nation at least thought it had a few months ago. Perhaps you can find a way to clarify the worker safety aspect of DNFSB's mandate.

Thank you for listening to these concerns and ideas.

Greg Mello