A May report from the Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments gave the Los Alamos National Laboratory high marks for increasing its safety staffing and implementing “adequate” safety training, qualifications and procedures.
However, the same report also noted that the National Nuclear Security Administration Los Alamos Field Office personnel and LANL officials aren’t consistently seeing eye to eye on the interpretation of safety requirements, even after LANL and the NNSA made moves to better communicate following some well-publicized safety breaches.
“Overall, although LANS has implemented many elements of its improvement plan, the persistent differences between LANS and NA-LA on their understanding of safety basis requirements continues to delay safety basis document development and maintenance,” a statement in the report said.
The office of Enterprise Assessments identified the source of the delays coming from the NNSA-Los Alamos Field Office.
“…EA identified that NA-LA (NNSA-Los Alamos Field Office) has not appropriately communicated to LANS (Los Alamos National Security, LANL’s current management and operations contractor) in a timely manner its concerns with evaluations of the situation (ESSs) for emergent situations existing in high hazard nuclear facilities,” a statement in the report said. “In several cases, NA-LA communicated significant concerns with LANS’s ESSs (evaluations of the situation) 6-12 months after receipt, significantly delaying NA-LA formal verification that LANS established safe and stable conditions for emergent situations.”
Tres DeRoma – LAMonitor.com – June 6, 2018.
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