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NUCLEAR SAFETY AND PUBLIC CONFIDENCE

Energy Facility Contractors Group (EFCOG) Executive Council

Joyce L. Connery

Chair, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board

June 10, 2021

[Thank the host for the invitation to speak and the introduction and 

thank the people for attending.]

Many of us in this virtual room are public servants—we are public 

officials, federal employees, and federal contractor leaders. We work 

for the American public, and our primary responsibilities are their 

health, safety, and welfare. And as for all public servants, our work is 

strongly influenced by public opinion.

My agency’s role is to advise the Secretary of Energy on issues of 

public health and safety in her role as regulator and operator of DOE’s

defense nuclear facilities. We are required by law to perform that role in 

a transparent way to help overcome public concerns about DOE’s 

history of safety and environmental problems.
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Now all of us understand that public confidence is established by 

maintaining the combination of a good safety record and a high-quality

performance record. Not surprisingly, we also know that the same 

combination of positive attributes helps to win new contracts and new

work. And lest we forget, safety and quality in nuclear operations is 

written into our DNA as nuclear professionals. 

So why have I started this discussion with a simple lesson on 

public confidence? Last week, I came across a recent article by Doctors

Baron and Herzog from Yale University.

1 In that article, they

emphasized that the American public has been skeptical of nuclear 

energy for decades. While opinion polls in the 1950s and 1960s showed 

high approval of nuclear power, polls conducted in the mid-1970s 

showed a rapid decline in public support. That support further declined 

following the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl commercial nuclear 

power plant accidents. 

1 Jonathon Baron, Stephen Herzog

Public opinion on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons: The attitudinal nexus in the United States

Available online 06 June 2020 via Elsevier
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As cited by Doctors Baron and Herzog,2 studies on this topic have

found that one of the drivers of this decline is, and I quote, “negative 

perceptions of safety—especially regarding accidents and radioactive 

discharge,” end quote. Another factor is associated with, and I quote,

“historical management and engineering failures at waste sites, leading 

to leaks,” end quote. As part of this study members of the public were

asked to describe the first image that comes to mind when seeing the 

word ‘nuclear.’ Respondents overwhelmingly associated the word 

‘nuclear’ with ‘destruction.’ That study concluded that, and I quote,

“the extent to which respondents associated destructive imagery with the 

mere mention of ‘nuclear,’ [signifies] a belief that most, if not all, 

nuclear technology is inherently violent or dangerous,” end quote.

The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents drove some 

initiatives for improving safety in DOE’s nuclear activities. In 1987, the 

National Research Council was very critical of safety conditions at 

DOE’s reactor facilities, identifying both managerial shortcomings and 

2 Jonathon Baron, Stephen Herzog

Public opinion on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons: The attitudinal nexus in the United States

Available online 06 June 2020 via Elsevier
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technical problems. In 1989, the Council identified numerous problems

with non-reactor facilities, including problems with aging facilities. 

In the late 1980s, public concern about the DOE nuclear complex 

was growing. In-depth congressional reviews and national media 

coverage informed the public of extensive safety problems and 

environmental contamination associated with DOE’s nuclear complex. 

At that time, restoring public confidence in DOE’s ability to conduct its 

activities safely became an imperative duty. In part, that combination of 

public concerns over the Chernobyl accident and DOE’s safety problems

drove Congress to establish my agency in 1988.

During the early years of our operation, the Board primarily

focused on DOE’s most urgent problems that were impacting its ability 

to meet its mission. At the top of the list were restarting production 

reactors at the Savannah River Site, restarting pit production at the 

Rocky Flats Plant, dealing with high-level liquid waste at Hanford, 

Idaho, and Savannah River, and starting up WIPP to provide a disposal 
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pathway for the large amount of transuranic waste accumulating at the 

DOE sites. 

The Board’s technical oversight activities set an energetic pace, 

yielding seven sets of formal recommendations in the first year, six sets 

in the second year, and another seven in the third year. Examples of the 

issues that the Board addressed in those early recommendations included 

the quality of the training and qualifications of reactor operators and 

supervisors at Savannah River; the generation of hydrogen in high-level 

liquid waste tanks; and the conduct of operations, criticality safety, and 

plutonium accumulation in systems at Rocky Flats.

The Board’s second recommendation, to develop and apply 

standards related to nuclear safety, was its first to address complex-wide

issues. Reviewing standards and their implementation at the defense 

nuclear facilities was, in fact, the first function Congress assigned to the 

Board in its enabling legislation. That recommendation, 

Recommendation 90-2, was focused on the development and application 

of standards related to nuclear safety and was the first step in guiding
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DOE toward a standards-based nuclear safety program. Two other early 

and important complex-wide recommendations covered the training and 

qualifications of DOE’s contractor staff and the technical competence of 

federal technical personnel. 

Today the Board still focuses on safety standards and technical 

competency. We just reaffirmed a recommendation on DOE’s nuclear 

safety standards in early June. And we are currently conducting reviews 

on personnel training and qualifications, which have been impacted by 

the workplace restrictions associated with the pandemic.

The complex has come a long way from those earlier days and the 

safety posture of the nuclear complex has greatly improved. 

Unfortunately, the complex still experiences events that negatively 

impact the public’s confidence in DOE; some of the early concerns are 

re-emerging as the facilities continue to grow older.

I’m going to focus on a few DOE incidents that affected public 

confidence, but I suspect that each of you can identify your own 
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examples given the diverse amount of nuclear-related work that DOE is 

responsible for completing each year.

Three events in recent years illustrate the complexities inherent in 

chemical interactions involving packaged radioactive waste. In these

events, unexpected energetic chemical reactions within the waste 

resulted in breaches and significant releases of radioactive material from 

the packages. 

The keyword here is “unexpected.” None of these events revealed 

any new scientific or technical information that we didn’t already know.

Instead, these events reminded us that we need to continue to pay 

attention to past lessons. The failure to heed those lessons damages the 

public’s confidence in DOE and the reputation of its contractors.

The first event occurred at WIPP, where on February 5, 2014, a 

fire involving an underground vehicle led to WIPP suspending 

operations. Then, on February 14, 2014, an incident occurred that 

resulted in a breached drum and expulsion of radioactive material into
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the mine. A large portion of the mine was contaminated, and a small 

amount of radioactive contamination was released into the environment. 

DOE suspended disposal of transuranic waste for almost three 

years while it investigated both the fire and radioactive release accidents

and implemented corrective actions. DOE concluded that the release 

event was due to energetic chemical reactions over-pressurizing and 

breaching a waste drum. Prior to shipment to WIPP, the drum had been 

subjected to chemical compatibility screenings and was incorrectly 

classified as not ignitable. DOE also determined that the amount of 

radioactive material released during the accident was larger than the 

amount predicted by DOE standards by almost two orders of magnitude. 

Waste disposal at WIPP did not resume until January 2017, with an 

estimated total cost of two billion dollars and a growing backlog of 

waste at generator sites across the complex, which DOE is still working 

through today.

Only 15 months after WIPP reopened, energetic chemical reactions 

occurred in four waste drums at Idaho National Laboratory. The drum 
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lids were ejected, and radiological material was spread within the 

facility. The drums contained legacy waste that had been repackaged 

that day, and Idaho personnel had relatively little information on the 

chemical composition of the waste in those drums. 

The contractor’s investigation of this event identified several 

chemical reactions that may have been involved with the release event. 

As with the WIPP event, those chemical reactions could have been 

anticipated and properly remediated had an adequate evaluation been 

conducted prior to packaging of the waste.

The third event occurred on February 26 of this year at Los 

Alamos’ Plutonium Facility. Again, the event involved waste, although 

in this case it was being packaged. Workers heard a noise and observed 

sparks emanating from a waste drum attached to a glovebox. The

workers left the room, pulled a fire alarm, and contacted the operations 

center. The contractor’s subsequent evaluation determined that the 

waste items in the drum included filters from an inert atmosphere 

glovebox used to weld non-radioactive metals including titanium alloy. 
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The likely explanation was that welding condensates of titanium on the 

filters underwent a pyrophoric reaction when a different waste item was 

added to the drum and breached a bagged filter allowing the influx of 

oxygen. The event was not energetic enough to cause an explosion but 

could have become an ignition source leading to a glovebox or room 

fire. 

So, what impact have these events had on DOE? First, there are 

the obvious impacts on DOE’s budgets and schedules. But I would 

argue that the more important impact is the loss of public confidence 

that DOE suffered following each of these events. Except for cost and 

schedule, the physical impacts of the events were small. None of the 

incidents injured workers or members of the public, contaminated any 

publicly accessible areas, or badly damaged any facilities. But DOE 

suffered reputational damage from the public’s mental images of 

exploding drums spewing clouds of radioactive waste. 

Since that first event in 2014, the Board has been evaluating how 

DOE analyzes hazards and implements controls at facilities that 
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generate, process, and store radioactive waste. During this time the 

Board has communicated several safety issues, common themes, and 

deficiencies to DOE regarding the need for expanded chemical 

compatibility evaluations, a technically defensible release fraction for 

energetic reaction events, improved control strategies to protect against 

energetic reactions, and necessary revisions to the DOE standards that 

address waste packaging activities.

Those communications include a Board letter and a technical

report issued last year regarding lessons learned from the WIPP and 

Idaho release events. In the letter, the Board outlined specific areas of 

concern that DOE should address during the revision of the standard, 

including the need to conduct chemical compatibility evaluations for 

waste not destined for WIPP; to use defensible release fractions for 

safety analyses and derivation of controls; to apply the defense-in-depth 

strategy for control of chemical reaction events to the management of 

waste; and to address the potential for flammable gas buildup and 

deflagration in vented drums.
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Other areas of concern to the Board include non-conservative and 

indefensible assumptions about waste container performance and DOE’s 

apparent lack of urgency in promulgating and implementing the 

applicable standards.

Although the Board so far has chosen not to communicate these 

concerns in formal recommendations, we strongly encourage DOE to act 

on our advice. Those actions would assist those performing the work to 

perform those activities safely, which in turn would help increase public 

confidence in DOE. The good news is that over the course of 2020, the 

Board’s staff has worked with the DOE team that is revising DOE 

Standard 55063 -- a standard which specifies how to analyze and control 

hazards at TRU waste facilities in the DOE complex -- regarding

concerns highlighted in the Board’s letter, as well as additional concerns 

that the staff provided via the DOE review and comment system. 

The technical report provided a site-specific case study on how the 

safety bases for several different facilities at Los Alamos treat the 

3 DOE Standard 5506, Preparation of Safety Basis Documents for Transuranic (TRU) Waste Facilities
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hazards posed by energetic chemical reactions. In the report, we

concluded that these safety bases do not consistently or appropriately 

consider a potential energetic chemical reaction involving transuranic 

waste. 

In those safety bases the Board noted identified hazard analyses 

that lack systematic evaluations of the chemical compatibility of waste 

streams, and accident analyses that assume inappropriate initial 

conditions and do not defensibly estimate the quantity of radioactive 

material that may be released during an energetic chemical reaction. 

Consequently, additional credited safety controls may be necessary to 

protect workers and the public.

Furthermore, some facilities store transuranic waste without any 

engineered controls beyond the waste container. The radiological 

release events that occurred at WIPP and Idaho National Laboratory

have demonstrated the importance of incorporating multiple layers of 

protection to reduce the consequences of an accident.
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We learned a lot from the WIPP event. In essence, that event 

taught us that there is a need to better understand what is in waste and a 

need to conduct defensible chemical compatibility evaluations. The 

later events at Idaho and Los Alamos revealed that those lessons had not 

been applied as broadly as we had hoped. These events highlighted that 

most of the focus has been on WIPP operations, rather than the waste 

while it is created, stored, and staged at the generator sites.

Waste characterization is also a challenge for legacy waste at the 

Hanford and Savannah River sites. It must be resolved successfully to 

complete the clean-up missions in Washington State and South Carolina. 

There are other areas that can also cause incidents that reduce 

public confidence. Conduct of operations, training, and qualification 

programs continue to be weak spots at some sites. We must do better, 

and holistically address these issues, rather than addressing only

individual concerns. Training refreshers and recertification are 

particularly important now, given the impacts of the COVID-19 

pandemic.
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There are many modernization and new construction efforts 

happening across the complex. Whether it is to modernize aging 

infrastructure or implement new congressional requirements, DOE must 

strive to implement best practices, state-of-the-art technologies, and the 

latest requirements and standards, if practicable, to ensure safety of 

operations at the defense nuclear facilities, and assure the public that 

safety is its number one priority.

In closing, we must always remember that public confidence, like 

trust, is very hard to earn but very easy to lose. 

We all know that DOE will continue to make mistakes, for it is an 

enterprise that faces and overcomes highly technical challenges with 

large inherent uncertainties. But when it does make a mistake, it must 

seek to learn from the mistake and address what it has learned. Making 

the same mistake twice, or more than twice, is a clear failure in the eyes 

of the public.

But most importantly we all, and I mean both DOE and my 

agency, must demonstrate to the public our commitment to safety. We 
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must stay vigilant in our field of work. We must demonstrate that 

commitment and vigilance in our actions, not only in our words. And 

above all, we must strive to keep both the public, the workers, and the 

environment safe.

Thank you; I’ll be happy to answer any of your questions.