The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is an independent government agency responsible for monitoring and advising the Department of Energy’s management of defense nuclear facilities. While the responsibility of waging nuclear war rests with the President, the Pentagon and branches of the military, the task of building America’s nuclear stockpile has been the responsibility of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). From the very beginning of the nation’s nuclear weapons program in World War II, building nuclear warheads became a complicated, dangerous and highly secret process. Consequently, with numerous, top-secret facilities stretching from one end of the country to another, US energy officials operated the nuclear weapons complex with little external oversight when it came to abiding by environmental and health laws, it was later discovered.
This lack of oversight allowed a 40-year history of significant environmental and health problems to accrue at facilities from Washington state to South Carolina. By the 1980s, accounts of air, soil and water contamination plus worker safety violations involving radioactive materials were reported by the media, prompting Congress to investigate. Congress came to the conclusion that a new government body was needed to keep an eye on DOE when it came to operating and decommissioning (now that the Cold War was over) defense nuclear facilities. Thus, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) was born.
The DNFSB is not a true regulatory body, for it lacks the ability to enforce its recommendations to the DOE. Instead, it advises and makes recommendations to the department which can accept or reject them. The DOE has never formally rejected any recommendation since the board was founded.
In 1942, while fighting a two-front war against Germany and Italy in Europe and Japan in the Pacific, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt embarked on an ambitious plan to build the world’s first atomic weapons. Known as the Manhattan Project, the effort established three secret facilities to conduct all of the necessary work for producing the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico served as the design and construction center where scientists built the weapons. Nuclear fuel for the bombs was produced at two other facilities: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where Uranium-235 was extracted from Uranium-238; and Hanford, Washington, which produced Plutonium.
All three facilities continued to serve critical functions in the years following WWII for America’s growing nuclear weapons complex, which eventually expanded into 15 major facilities and another dozen smaller ones playing roles in the research, production and testing of nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, the AEC/DOE’s top priority was to build more and more weapons, including those with increasing destructive capability, as the U.S. sought to maintain numerical superiority in the arms race against the Soviet Union. With production of weapons the overriding objective, energy officials paid less attention to safeguards against environmental degradation and radiation exposure to facility employees.
This became abundantly clear as the Cold War came to a close and investigations were conducted into the management of defense nuclear facilities by US energy officials. A 1994 report by the Congressional Budget Office said the DOE was faced with the disposing of 100 million gallons of highly radioactive waste spread out across the country among different facilities. The price tag for clean up was estimated at more than $100 billion. A few locations in particular - Hanford, Oak Ridge, Savannah River (South Carolina) and Rocky Flats (Colorado) - received considerable media coverage for serious contamination involving uranium, plutonium and various heavy metals.
Coupled with these revelations were the earlier accidents at nuclear power plants at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in the Ukraine which elevated public concerns over nuclear safety. A National Research Council study in 1987 examined the conditions with nuclear reactors at Savannah River and Hanford in the wake of Chernobyl and found that DOE officials had relied almost exclusively on private contractors to identify safety concerns instead of using DOE experts, resulting in failures to adequately address technical mishaps. Another investigation by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee found that energy officials had failed to sufficiently address radiation exposure among workers at Hanford, Savannah River, Oak Ridge and Rocky Flats.
In an effort to stop such mistakes from continuing, legislation was introduced in 1987 in both the House and Senate to establish a new independent government authority outside of the DOE to provide oversight of DOE’s management of defense nuclear facilities. The House bill, by Rep. Norman Dicks (D-WA), would have given the new authority the ability to hold hearings, conduct depositions and issue subpoenas - and more importantly, the power to suspend operations or construction at new or existing defense nuclear facilities if public health or safety was deemed to be at risk. Ultimately, however, Congress adopted legislation by Senator John Glenn (D-OH) that established the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board which was not granted the power to suspend operations at facilities, thus limiting the board’s ability to enforce changes upon the DOE.
The board’s first decade
(PDF)
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is an independent government agency responsible for monitoring and advising DOE’s management of defense nuclear facilities, some of which today are being dismantled and cleaned up. Under its mandate from Congress, the board is charged with ensuring the implementation of DOE health and safety standards by energy officials and to issue advisory recommendations regarding work at facilities.
The board also investigates operations or specific problems that arise at facilities that could adversely impact public health or safety and issues recommendations to address these problems. The DNFSB publishes unclassified reports with recommendations to correct problems at DOE facilities.
In the 20 years since the board was founded, the DOE has never formally rejected any recommendation by the board. However, according to the US Government Accountability Office, this does not mean there haven’t been disagreements over recommendations,. To avoid any adverse publicity, the department and board generally work out their differences at the staff level so DOE doesn’t have to resort to officially rejecting the board’s advice.
Nevertheless, the board has been effective in influencing key decisions by the Secretary of Energy. In 2004, the DOE was considering rule changes that would have allowed private contractors who run nuclear facilities to determine worker safety standards. The board publicly opposed this measure, and the department subsequently backed off on implementing the change.
Energy Dept. Shifts on Nuclear Plant Rule
(New York Times)
Stakeholders include those with vested interests in the work of the DNFSB range from defense contractors and multi-national engineering and construction firms to grass-roots citizens groups and universities. Fluor, an international engineering and construction firm, is heavily involved in the cleanup operations at Fernald, a former uranium processing facility in Ohio, and at the Hanford facility, which has been described as the most dangerous environmental project in the country because of the scope of the cleanup. Also performing work at Hanford are construction giants Bechtel (which has a stake in Savannah River) and CH2M Hill, which is handling cleanup work at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory and is involved with work at Savannah River.
Babcock & Wilcox, an engineering energy firm, has contracts for Savannah River and Pantex, the nation’s central facility for assembling and dismantling nuclear warheads.
Defense contractor Lockheed Martin runs the Sandia National Laboratories for DOE, and Battelle, an international science and technology firm, co-operates the Oakridge facility in conjunction with the University of Tennessee. Another prominent higher education stakeholder is the University of California, which has long managed Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California for the federal government.
The DNFSB has maintained a low public profile and garnered little attention in the media, except for brief references to its reports in stories about problems at defense nuclear facilities. Criticism over lapses in safety at these facilities has been targeted at DOE, not the board, since it is the former rather than the latter that is responsible for managing these operations. But the board has got caught in the middle on occasion between DOE and public interest groups monitoring conditions at facilities.
For instance, in January 2006, a coalition of peace and security activists wrote to the board’s chairman, A. J. Eggenberger, citing a report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) which uncovered evidence in DOE documents that at least 300 kilograms of plutonium was unaccounted for at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). “Given that this large amount of unaccounted plutonium could present national security, public health and environmental threats, we are writing to request that you open an immediate investigation into plutonium accounting at LANL,” read the letter.
In his response, Eggenberger punted, saying the accusation of plutonium being “diverted for hostile purposes” is “beyond the Board’s statutory authority.” He added that the matter had been brought to DOE’s attention by the IEER, inferring that it was unnecessary for the board to act further.
The board also became the focus of criticism when President Bush selected two new board members in September 2006. Those members, Larry Brown and Peter Winokaur, were both ex-DOE officials. Brown, an attorney in DOE’s legal office, had worked on a Bush administration initiative to promote the expansion of nuclear energy worldwide, while Winokaur, a former staffer of Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), had come over from DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Tom Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit government and corporate watchdog organization, told Inside Energy the nominations represented an attempt by the Bush administration to stack the board “with people they can trust, and turning it into more of a lapdog than a watchdog.”
|
Founded: 1988
Annual Budget: $22 million
Employees: 95
|
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
|
|
|
Eggenberger, A.J.
Chairman
|
|
|
Born in Harlowton, Montana, A.J. Eggenberger is only the second chairman in the 20-year history of the Defense Nuclear Facilites Safety Board, having succeeded the board’s original chairman, John Conway, in July 2005. From 1972 to 1984, he worked in the private sector with D'Appolonia Consulting Engineers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was an associate partner in charge of the Nuclear Facilities Group that dealt with engineering issues ranging from mining, milling, fabrication, and reprocessing to disposal facilities in the U.S. and abroad. He then served at the National Science Foundation as program director and leader of the Earthquake Hazard Mitigation Program until he was appointed vice chairman of the DNFSB in 1989.
|
|
|
|