[CPEO-MEF] Nuclear safety at weapons laboratoraties

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

Nuclear and Worker Safety: Actions Needed to Determine the Effectiveness 
of Safety Improvement Efforts at NNSA's Weapons Laboratories
GAO-08-73  October 31, 2007

Federal officials, Congress, and the public have long voiced concerns 
about safety at the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories: Lawrence 
Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. The laboratories are overseen by the 
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), while contractors carry 
out the majority of the work. A recent change to oversight policy would 
result in NNSA's relying more on contractors' own management controls, 
including those for assuring safety. This report discusses (1) the 
recent history of safety problems at the laboratories and contributing 
factors, (2) steps taken to improve safety, and (3) challenges that 
remain to effective management and oversight of safety. To address these 
objectives, GAO reviewed almost 100 reports and investigations and 
interviewed key federal and laboratory officials.

The nuclear weapons laboratories have experienced persistent safety 
problems, stemming largely from long-standing management weaknesses. 
Since 2000, nearly 60 serious accidents or near misses have occurred, 
including worker exposure to radiation, inhalation of toxic vapors, and 
electrical shocks. Although no one was killed, many of the accidents 
caused serious harm to workers or damage to facilities. Accidents and 
nuclear safety violations also contributed to the temporary shutdown of 
facilities at both Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore in 2004 and 2005. 
Yet safety problems persist. GAO's review of nearly 100 reports issued 
since 2000 found that the contributing factors to these safety problems 
generally fall into three key areas: relatively lax laboratory attitudes 
toward safety procedures, laboratory inadequacies in identifying and 
addressing safety problems with appropriate corrective actions, and 
inadequate oversight by NNSA site offices. NNSA and its contractors have 
been taking some steps to address safety weaknesses at the laboratories. 
Partly in response to continuing safety concerns, NNSA has begun taking 
steps to reinvigorate a key safety effort--integrated safety 
management--originally started in 1996. This initiative was intended to 
raise safety awareness and provide a formal process for employees to 
integrate safety into every work activity by identifying potential 
safety hazards and taking appropriate steps to mitigate these hazards. 
NNSA and its contractors have also begun taking steps to develop or 
improve systems for identifying and tracking safety problems and the 
corrective actions taken in response. Finally, NNSA has initiated 
efforts to strengthen federal oversight at the laboratories by improving 
hiring and training of federal site office personnel. NNSA has also 
taken steps to strengthen contractor accountability through new contract 
mechanisms. Many of these efforts are still under way, however, and 
their effect on safety performance is not clear. NNSA faces two 
principal challenges in its continuing efforts to improve safety at the 
weapons laboratories. First, the agency has no way to determine the 
effectiveness of its safety improvement efforts, in part because those 
efforts rarely incorporate outcome-based performance measures. The 
department issued a directive in 2003 requiring use of a disciplined 
approach for managing improvement initiatives, often used by 
high-performing organizations, including results-oriented outcome 
measures and a system to evaluate the effectiveness of the initiative. 
Yet GAO found little indication that NNSA or its contractors have been 
managing safety improvement efforts using this approach. Second, in 
light of the long-standing safety problems at the laboratories, GAO and 
others have expressed concerns about the recent shift in NNSA's 
oversight approach to rely more heavily on contractors' own safety 
management controls. Continuing safety problems, coupled with the 
inability to clearly demonstrate progress in remedying weaknesses, make 
it unclear how this revised system will enable NNSA to maintain an 
appropriate level of oversight of safety performance at the weapons 
laboratories.

For the original summary and a link to the full report, go to
http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-08-73



-- 


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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