DOE Gives Nuclear Labs One Heck of a Long Winter Vacation

If your kid accidentally blew apart a building, would you give them less supervision?

This hands-off approach is exactly what the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is doing by giving the contractors who manage the nation’s eight nuclear weapons sites (Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Nevada Test Site, Sandia National Laboratory, Savannah River Site, Pantex, Y-12, and the Kansas City Plant) a six-month break from many regularly scheduled oversight reviews.

On December 18, 2009--two days after researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) accidentally blew apart a building, causing an initial estimate of $3 million in damage--NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino signed a directive “placing a six-month moratorium on NNSA-initiated functional assessments, reviews, evaluations and inspections.” POGO saw this directive coming, as DOE and NNSA have initiated reforms to put contractors in charge of their own oversight, "Reforming the Nuclear Security Enterprise." POGO is not convinced that this moratorium is so temporary, and is interested to know what NNSA is going to do with all of the federal full time employees at the site offices and headquarters it no longer needs as a result of this directive.

Getting a hiatus from regular reviews are many of the areas that have had recent serious problems—security, nuclear safety, cyber security, Material Control and Accountability (MC&A), contractor assurance systems that relate to contract oversight, property accountability, and nuclear weapons quality. For example, the weaknesses with Los Alamos’s MC&A program were so significant it took NNSA more than a year and a half to resolve them. Additionally, it was NNSA, not the contractor that found that Los Alamos treated its loss of more than 67 computers merely as a property management issue, and not as a potential lapse in cyber security. Over the last few years, POGO has also discovered countless security and safety incidents at Los Alamos, Livermore National Laboratory, Pantex, and Y-12, that the contractors had not provided oversight sufficient to prevent and resolve the problems. In the past, a senior manager at Los Alamos and his sidekick went to jail when the procurement system got out of control. Now, the directive exempts Los Alamos from a procurement management review.

NNSA’s new approach to federal safety and security oversight is irresponsible—stopping it in its entirety for six months. POGO would instead like to see NNSA make a New Year’s resolution to conduct smarter, more rigorous oversight of its labs. Such a move could prevent some of the costly contractor errors that occurred in 2009, such as Los Alamos’s Plutonium Facility (PF-4) needing to stop its main operations for more than one month, once again, because of the contractor and NNSA’s inadequate oversight of its fire suppression system.

-- Ingrid Drake

Comments

[POGO]

Again, NNSA Spokesperson Damien LaVera's response to our press release was fact-free. [http://blogs.knoxnews.com/munger/2010/01/moratorium_on_oversight_of_wea.html] In a comment to Frank Munger's Atomic City Underground, LaVera claims that a major purpose of NNSA's 6-month freeze on crucial reviews at the nuclear weapon sites is to free up oversight full time employees (FTEs) for more important functions. The only problem with this is that NNSA officials had a meeting in Washington a few days earlier trying to determine what they would do with the 50-70 FTE.

[Lance Williamson]

“We understand that Program Offices view safety as an impediment which slows down widget production because of the fussy safety guys.”

That is patently false POGO. 10 years ago it took ~200 direct man-hours to safely & securely dismantle a typical nuclear warhead/bomb. Today, after years of excessive regulations and oversight from NNSA & the DNFSB it now takes ~2000 direct man-hours to accomplish the same level of effort.

Pushing production at the expense of safety is a POGO lie. The only thing being pushed here is POGO’s little hidden agenda.

[POGO]

The NNSA sites have persistent safety, security, business, etc. problems that have not ever been fixed for decades. Root causes remain unidentified in a reliable and consistent manner from DOE and NNSA. Congress continually thrashes around on this and keeps coming up with fixes like transfer safety to the NRC that are not coupled in a definitive and logical manner to causes.

While we believe there are many employees at NNSA who take seriously their job to fix the problems, at the same time, it is clear to many that a part of the root cause is that the DOE/NNSA have not been doing their oversight jobs well. This may stem from the fact that DOE/NNSA are sometimes confused because the Federal and Contractor Program Offices, which control all of the money, are also interested in little more than production. We understand that Program Offices view safety as an impediment which slows down widget production because of the fussy safety guys. Since Program controls the money, and program personnel dominate the higher echelons of NNSA and DOE, they control the overall direction of the DOE and NNSA. A potential fix is to require that the program side of NNSA and the contractor be held accountable for safety as well as widget production in, for example, their personal performance reviews.

[Marylia Kelley]

I have a question -- the memo lists CAS reviews at LLNL as among the types of reviews to be curtailed during the moratorium. Yet the financial illegality at the NIF (discovered by a NNSA OFFM internal review, btw) is that LLNL management violated the CAS (cost accounting standards, found in public law 100-679). So, does it make sense to you, given the facts, that NNSA would suspend CAS reviews at LLNL for 6 months? And, do you know if NNSA HQ is pursuing any specific review of the CAS violations at NIF despite the 6-month moratorium? Inquiring minds want to know.

[lance Williamson]

Let’s see. You’re concerned that NNSA is not utilizing their existing Federal employees because of this moratorium but, on the other hand you propose that NNSA should be doing more extensive oversight reviews which will require even more Federal NNSA employees.

I think you’re just promoting bigger Government to make the existing NNSA suffocating oversight more stifling in hopes of permanently shutting down the NWC and the nuclear weapons capabilities of America. NNSA is at best incompetent & you propose as a solution more NNSA. I don’t think you have a clue as to the existing problems.