By George Lobsenz
In a report that has been hotly contested by the Energy Department (DoE), the Government Accountability Office says the Bush administration largely undermined independent safety oversight of the department’s high-hazard nuclear facilities by taking away key resources and responsibilities from DoE’s designated watchdog office.
The report, released recently by Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), said while the administration created the Office of Health, Safety and Security (HSS) in 2006 with the goal of strengthening safety oversight, GAO found that HSS largely lacked the tools, authority, site-specific safety knowledge–and independence from DoE management–to do so.
The report recommended that DoE bolster HSS’s independence and oversight capabilities and said that if the department did not do so, Congress should pass legislation clearly delineating HSS’ roles and responsibilities.
Alternatively, GAO said Congress could end DoE’s authority to self-regulate its nuclear facilities and hand over oversight powers to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), a federal agency that oversees DoE facilities and provides recommendations for safety fixes that DoE must either accept or reject.
However, the DNFSB, commenting on the GAO report, suggested its current authority was sufficient, noting that DoE has never rejected any of the board’s recommendations.
NRC declined to comment on taking over regulation of DoE facilities–though the commission this summer issued a report questioning whether DoE’s safety oversight is sufficiently independent from DoE line management to be effective.
GAO’s recommendations could prompt action in Congress, where key Democrats in the House and Senate in the past have challenged the Bush administration’s restructuring of DoE’s oversight offices two years ago as unwise and detrimental to safety at DoE’s many aging and highly contaminated nuclear facilities.
“Without strong independent oversight, self-regulation is bound to fail,” said Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement. “This GAO report underscores the administration’s blind loyalty to a failed deregulatory model that has essentially placed safety in direct competition with productivity at high-hazard nuclear facilities.”
Acting Deputy Energy Secretary Jeffrey Kupfer provided a strong and lengthy rebuttal to GAO’s findings, saying the report was fundamentally and unfairly biased against DoE’s safety management approach, which leans heavily on DoE’s program offices to monitor safety performance at their own sites and facilities and fix any problems in a timely fashion.
Kupfer said DoE program offices needed to have primary responsibility for safety oversight because they are ultimately responsible for safety. He also contended HHS has helped the program offices achieve improved safety while also providing valuable oversight and enforcement when serious safety problems arose.
However, GAO said it found evidence that DoE’s approach was not working in important respects.
For example, it found dozens of DoE facilities where safety analyses were out of date or non-compliant with the department’s safety regulations–some for many years.
It also said program offices routinely got around those safety issues by issuing “justifications for continued operations,” or JCOs, that allowed them and their contractors to avoid indefinitely expensive fixes–a problem the DNFSB also has flagged.
At the same time, GAO said HSS was given no responsibility for reviewing all facility safety analyses nor was HHS regularly involved in reviewing JCOs or the adequacy of corrective actions taken by program offices.
Among other specific findings, GAO said HHS did not regularly conduct inspections at some sensitive sites as required by DoE policy; did not review safety analyses for some nuclear facilities and lacked knowledge about safety gaps at some facilities; did not have sufficient staff with technical expertise at sites; and failed to regularly follow up with contractors and site officials to ensure safety issues were corrected.
More broadly, GAO questioned the administration’s decision in 2006 to hand over many safety oversight responsibilities and DoE technical experts to program offices, who are directly responsible for running facilities and carrying out DoE missions such as nuclear cleanup, scientific research and nuclear weapons and nonproliferation work.
GAO noted the administration claimed that safety would be improved by giving program offices more responsibility and expertise to oversee DoE contractors because program offices have more detailed knowledge about their facilities and operations than HHS and other DoE headquarters officials could have.
However, GAO said there was an inherent conflict of interest in having program offices monitor their own safety performance because fixing safety problems and coming into compliance with safety regulations typically costs money that program offices would rather spend on mission-related activities.
GAO also acknowledged that DoE’s program offices were ultimately responsible for safety, but said the department failed to understand the concept or value of independent oversight.
“In any program subject to safety regulation, the regulated entity is ultimately responsible to ensure safety,” GAO said in its report. “This fact does not diminish the need for independent oversight.
“DoE program offices face competing and often conflicting goals of maximizing project performance and minimizing cost. The steps necessary to ensure safety and to independently validate these steps can run counter to achieving mission objectives.
“Essentially, DoE’s approach to self-regulation rests on the assumption that personnel within the program offices can overcome any conflicts of interest in achieving program objectives while ensuring safety and the current level of independent oversight and enforcement of nuclear safety by HHS is appropriate.”
Key findings in the GAO report included:
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HHS was not aware that 31 of 205 high-hazard nuclear facilities do not have updated safety analysis documents, and about one-third of those facilities have long-running JCOs in place that do not conform with DoE policies to limit such Band-Aid safety fixes. In addition, GAO said HHS has no role in reviewing safety analyses for new nuclear facilities, even though they may raise significant safety issues.
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HHS has no staff permanently assigned to DoE sites and thus cannot make routine, independent observations of safety there. DoE transferred many technical experts from HHS to the program offices and HHS still does not have a full complement of nuclear experts on staff.
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Of 22 DoE sites with a high-hazard nuclear facility, eight were not inspected by HHS or a predecessor DoE oversight office during the last five years. In addition, the Office of River Protection, which manages high-level radioactive storage tanks at the Hanford site, has not been inspected since 2001, though HHS did investigate a tank waste leak in 2007.