President Obama’s message last week to the new director of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) was “to build an organization that acts as the oil industry’s watchdog—not its partner." The President hit on a truism: federal agencies need to be competent watchdogs to be good stewards of the public trust, and a good watchdog can’t be everyone’s best buddy.
In stark contrast, a few blocks away at another federal agency, a different message is being sent. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Tom D’Agostino have been telling DOE staff and the contractors who run the nuclear weapons labs and production facilities that they should partner.
"Well, let me just say that the Department of Energy takes safety and security very, very seriously," Chu said, adding that he wants DOE to be viewed as a "valued partner and an asset" to contractors that manage and operate the federal facilities. (Emphasis POGO’s)
DOE Secretary Steven Chu and NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino have both recently set the goal that 50% of the DOE safety requirements be removed and in doing so sent clear signals that DOE should partner with the contractor rather than be the contractor’s watchdog. Well, this is exactly what is occurring at Los Alamos National Laboratory, (LANL), the largest nuclear weapons laboratory in the U.S.
POGO obtained an official Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) summary of the findings from a draft report by the DOE Inspector General (IG) that is being kept under wraps. The IG found that LANL has potential major safety problems because the Quality Assurance (QA) Program that is supposed to ensure that nuclear safety systems are working is flat on its back at Los Alamos. For example, LANL “operated 6 of 18 nuclear facilities without approved, compliant, and implemented Documented Safety Analyses.” Without these approved Analyses, there are no current safety controls to protect the public against radioactive accidental releases. (Does this sound familiar? It reminds us of MMS’s approval of BP’s disaster response plan.)
Basically, the IG report’s implication is that DOE, and its Los Alamos Site Office (LASO), has been a partner— not a watchdog —on safety. The report further states that “failures occurred because of inadequate oversight by LASO, which did not require compliance with the NQA-1 [Nuclear Quality Assurance] requirements.” The significance of LANL not complying with the NQA-1 requirements is that none of the safety controls necessary to protect the public from a nuclear disaster can be relied on to function and protect the public during an accident. Well, if LANL and the local DOE Site Office are wrong on this and NQA-1 turns out to be required, then LANL only has to wait to get its way until DOE Secretary Chu removes the order requirement as one of the approximately 160 safety requirements (50 percent of the estimated 320 DOE Orders, Standards, guides, and manuals on safety, security, the environment, etc.) that he plans to get rid of.
POGO understands that the report was supposed to come out in December 2009, but has been held up in an endless comment cycle inside the IG office and has also been delayed by comments from LASO that support the contractor’s blasting of the report.
In an astounding we-are-above-the-law approach, LANL contends in its formal summary that compliance with the nuclear industry’s QA “gold standard,” Nuclear Quality Assurance (NQA-1), is not required by the relevant DOE requirements. But isn’t it referenced in number 4, section A), part two, subpart a) under “REQUIREMENTS” in DOE order 414.1C?
During the last several months when disasters struck, the President and the Congress asked incredulously: Where were the government watchdogs? When almost 30 miners got killed in the West Virginia coal mine explosion, our leaders wanted to know: Where was the Mine Safety & Health Administration? Where was MMS when BP was engaged in high-risk drilling in the Gulf and 11 rig workers were killed? And let’s not forget the shortcomings of the financial sector regulators that have come to light in the wake of the financial crisis.
Both the President and the Congress have been fully aware for years that MMS and Mine Safety have been lapdogs of the industries they were regulating. If an accident happens at a nuclear weapons facility the loss of life and damage to the environment could make the Gulf disaster look like a picnic. Hopefully it doesn’t take a disaster to get Congress and the President to pay attention to what is happening at DOE and to realize that a good watchdog can’t be everybody’s partner—regulators should focus on being the public’s partner.
-- Peter Stockton and Ingrid Drake
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