For immediate release August 28, 2018

Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board Convenes Hearing, Condemns Restrictive Trump Safety Order

Order Eliminates External Oversight at Most Defense Nuclear Facilities

Ends Formal External Safety Oversight for Defense Nuclear Workers Except As Necessary to Protect Off-Site Public

Contact: Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group, 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell

Selected background

Permanent link * Previous press releases

Albuquerque, NM – Today the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB, Board) convened a hearing to examine issues related to Department of Energy (DOE) Order 140.1, "Interface with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board," approved by the Secretary of Energy on May 14, 2018.

As the hearing ended, Acting DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton said it was only the first of up to three hearings on the highly-controversial order. Such attention to a DOE Order by the Board is unprecedented.

The Order would eliminate formal DNFSB oversight for the majority of defense nuclear facilities, those judged by DOE not to have potential public health and safety consequences in the event of accidents (i.e. those categorized by DOE as "Hazard Category 3" and below).

The Order ends all formal DOE cooperation with DNFSB as regards worker safety per se, both workers in defense nuclear facilities as well as co-located workers in other facilities nearby. The only formal cooperation with the Board that is allowed under the Order is that which bears on public health and safety.

DOE witnesses made clear that while informal cooperation and suggestions about worker safety are always welcome, DOE is no longer under any obligation to formally respond to DNFSB requests and concerns unless public health and safety are implicated.

DOE witnesses were Undersecretary Dan Brouillette, Associate Under Secretary for Environment, Health, Safety and Security Matthew Moury, and Ike White, Chief of Staff for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty.

Video, exhibits, and eventually transcripts from today's hearing will be available at the above link.

Upending three decades of prior mutual agreement and practice, in this Order DOE defines the "public" as not including workers.

At today's hearing, the four Board members took turns condemning the new Order overall and in eloquent detail -- at times vehemently.

In their closing statements Board members made clear their varied dissatisfaction with the responses they received from the DOE witnesses.

At the outset of the hearing it was noted by the Acting Chair that the new Order appeared to conflict with the Board's enabling legislation (the Atomic Energy Act as successively modified).

Study Group Director Greg Mello:

"We view the new Order with grave concern. It is an existential danger to the DNFSB's work.

"We believe it violates the overall intent as well as many specific sections of the Atomic Energy Act (AEA) as amended [42 U.S.C. §2286 et. seq.]

"Order 140.1 will greatly undermine the operation of the Board, increase bureaucratic burdens at both DOE and DNFSB, and could have the effect of making the DNFSB largely a vestigial, figurehead agency.

"Under the new Order DOE, and not DNFSB, will be the agency that decides whether a given document or defense nuclear facility or operation should be open to DNFSB oversight -- directly contradicting existing law. Any issue that bears on worker safety and health merely, and not also public health and safety, has been unilaterally redefined by DOE as outside the Board’s mandate.

"As today's hearing made clear, DOE created this Order with intimate involvement from its contractors but in total secrecy from the Board, local communities, the public, and unions.  

"At today's hearing, Board members raised legal, technical, practical, and even moral objections to the new Order. Ms Connery said she had a 'visceral' reaction to the order. So do we.

"We agree with all the concerns raised by the Board. But the fact of the matter is that the DNFSB's legal mandate does not include the words "worker," or "worker safety." The Trump Administration and some key nuclear contractors have decided that now is an opportune moment to take advantage of that inherent weakness to drive forward an anti-regulatory, nuclear production agenda in order to return to make the nuclear production complex 'great again.' They want to drive a wedge between public health and worker health, isolating the latter both literally and figuratively.

"Protecting worker safety has always been a major emphasis of the Board in part because public health and safety -- the main focus of the Board's mandate -- cannot be protected without protecting workers. And the Board does have -- or has had up until this Order -- a clear mandate to advise on all DOE defense nuclear facilities standards, operations, and related matters, all of which bear directly on worker safety.

"The Board has been able to address worker safety in part because there has been a political consensus supporting that protection. We are now in a new Cold War. With this Order and in the other ways DOE is weakening safety standards and protections, the Trump Administration is testing that political consensus. 

"We believe the Board should make it clear to Congress, which created the Board in 1988, that under the terms of this Order the Board will be unable to protect DOE atomic energy defense workers from nuclear hazards. At a minimum Congress should expand DNFSB’s mandate to explicitly advise DOE on worker safety and health at all defense nuclear facilities, in parallel to DNFSB’s explicit public safety and health mandate. We call upon the New Mexico congressional delegation to lead the charge on this.

"What is being done in the name of decreasing 'red tape' is a travesty, and very dangerous for workers. It will increase, not decrease, bureaucratic burdens.

"There is no question that the present Order was drafted in order to remove the DNFSB as an obstacle to Trump Administration plans to jump-start nuclear weapons production, particularly the construction of new facilities for production of plutonium nuclear warhead cores ("pits").

"Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is the only place pits can be produced until at least 2030. NNSA's pit production plans require converting an existing LANL radiological laboratory into a Hazard Category 3 nuclear facility without having constructed it to nuclear facility standards. This Order removes this facility from DNFSB purview.

"Under recent new law, NNSA must explore round-the-clock production of pits at LANL; at today's hearing it emerged that preliminary DNFSB queries concerning the safety implications of plutonium shift work at LANL have been rebuffed because of this Order. 

"NNSA's Engineering Assessment for pit production assumes -- citing LANL design documents -- that the proposed underground pit production modules at LANL would have no public health and safety impacts in the event of a worst-case accident and hence no need for active safety-class systems such as surviving active ventilation and fire protection. So these proposed multibillion-dollar facilities may well also be exempt from DNFSB design, construction, and operational oversight under this Order."

"The full impact of this Order cannot be accurately assessed without figuring in the impact of DNFSB's recent reorganization and massive staff cut ("Massive Staff Cut, Reorganization Proposed at Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board," Aug 17, 2018). Either blow might be fatal for the DNFSB. Together they spell doom for this fine agency, with so many talented people. Without DNFSB's careful review, fatal accidents and sicknesses -- who knows how many, and with what public health and environmental consequences -- are a certainty in the defense nuclear business."

***ENDS***