'Extensive' Oversight of Nuclear Weapons Facilities Not Such a Bad Idea, After All, Official Says

By MIA STEINLE

In 2010, a top Department of
Energy official wrote a memo saying government contractors responsible for
safety and security at nuclear weapons facilities should be spared “excessive
Federal oversight.”

The official, Deputy Secretary Daniel
B. Poneman, also said contractors managing the facilities should be allowed to
operate without “overly prescriptive Departmental requirements.”

What a difference a nun makes.

When a House subcommittee
convened Wednesday to probe how an 82-year-old nun and two other peace
activists managed to penetrate one of the most sensitive facilities in the
nation’s nuclear weapons complex, Poneman emphasized that the contractors need
extensive government oversight.

“Safety and security are key
performance standards and elements of every contract and extensive oversight is
required to ensure stewardship as well as legal and regulatory requirements are
met,” Poneman said in written testimony.

The official’s testimony showed
how the July security breach at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak
Ridge, Tenn., has changed the debate over management of the facilities,
countering what had been momentum in Congress to grant private contractors the
greater autonomy they’ve been seeking.

“We support a vigorous and active
advisory, oversight, and enforcement effort,” Poneman said.

“Systemic failures and a security
culture of complacency” allowed the activists to breach the Y-12 security,
Poneman said in his testimony.

Y-12, the self-proclaimed “Fort Knox
for highly enriched uranium,” provides uranium for nuclear weapons. B&W
Y-12, a partnership of Babcock & Wilcox and Bechtel National, is contracted
to operate the facility. WSI-Oak Ridge operates Y-12’s security forces.

Following the July break-in, the top contractor executives who oversaw
security, the security leadership and the guards who allowed the break-in were
either “removed” or reassigned, Poneman said.

Republican and Democratic members
of the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on oversight and
investigations echoed calls from government investigators to strengthen
oversight of the nuclear weapons complex, which is composed of the DOE, the
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the private contractors
that run its facilities.

“We need multiple layers of
strong oversight at our nuclear facilities. We can’t simply assume that NNSA
and its contractors are making appropriate security decisions,” Rep. Henry
Waxman (D-Calif.) said.

“By all accounts, contractor and
site managers’ failures at Y-12 allowed one of the most serious security
breakdowns in the history of the weapons complex,” subcommittee chairman Rep. Cliff
Stearns (R-Fla.) said.

The NNSA, a semiautonomous agency
created by the DOE in 2000, oversees eight contractor-managed nuclear facilities.
The agency’s $10.5 billion budget in 2011 accounts for about 40 percent of the
DOE’s total budget.

Previously classified documents
show that government investigators warned the NNSA and Y-12 management of “lax
security” at the facility at least two years before the break-in, the
Washington Post reported yesterday.

Among other issues, the documents
showed that security cameras and sensors at Y-12 were inoperable or gave off
false alarms, according to the Post.

A recent DOE inspector general
investigation found that some security cameras at the facility had been broken
for six months at the time of the break-in. The inspector general’s report
blamed the break-in on “troubling displays of ineptitude” by facility personnel—problems
that had been documented by the Project
On Government Oversight.

“The ineptness and negligence is
mind-boggling,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said.

The Government Accountability
Office (GAO) has considered DOE, and later NNSA, a “high risk of fraud, waste,
abuse, and mismanagement” since 1990. The NNSA has not resolved its
“long-standing management problems,” according to the prepared testimony of GAO’s
Mark Gaffigan.

A pending House defense bill
would weaken the government’s ability to oversee nuclear facilities.

“In our view, the problems we
continue to identify in the nuclear security enterprise are not caused by
excessive oversight, but instead result from ineffective oversight,” Gaffigan
said.

DOE Inspector General Gregory
Friedman, who testified at the hearing, cited his office’s history of
investigations into the NNSA and its private contractors. Recent security and
safety issues at nuclear weapons facilities include worker overexposure to the cancer-causing element beryllium and the vulnerability of national
security information at nuclear facilities.

Mia
Steinle is an investigator for the Project On Government Oversight.

Follow @miasteinle

2012-09-28 03:40:20

Source: http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2012/09/oversight_of_nuclear_weapons_facilities_not_a_bad_idea.html