During the Summer of 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) took the rare step of redacting, or censoring, four weekly reports submitted by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s (DNFSB) Resident Inspectors (RI) stationed at the Savannah River Site. Although not known with absolute certainty at the time that the redacted entries were related to COVID-19 impacts on site operations, the Board recently confirmed that was the case. In response to a FOIA request for unredacted reports that has been forwarded to DOE for consultation, the DNFSB also revealed that it disagreed then, and continues to disagree, with DOE’s decision to redactions portions of the four weekly reports pertaining to COVID impacts. The information to date suggests the redactions were due primarily to reporting of staffing shortages at Defense Nuclear Facilities that were sufficient enough to compromise or potentially compromise compliance with technical safety requirements for some facility operations.

by Don Moniak
June 4, 2024*

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is the sole independent oversight agency authorized to monitor operations at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS) and other nuclear weapons complex facilities. It was chartered in 1988 “with the responsibility of providing recommendations and advice to the President and the Secretary of Energy regarding public health and safety issues at Department of Energy defense nuclear facilities.” The agency has no enforcement authority.

The DNFSB is a lean and stoic organization that achieves results through what might be described as legislatively mandated peer pressure. Perhaps its most notable oversight work at SRS was Recommendation 2012-1, which catalyzed the long-overdue effort to safely address the extreme risk from residual radioactive materials within the former Plutonium-238 processing facility known as Building 235-F.

Another major, SRS-related Board oversight effort involved the stabilization of “thousands” of containers of “plutonium-bearing liquids and solids” across the former Cold War-era weapons complex that were stored in various configurations with highly variable levels of instability. Recommendation 94-1 was enacted to address the safety deficiencies, ultimately making a key contribution to the stabilization of approximately 9.5 metric tons of plutonium prior to it being shipped to SRS for long-term storage at the site’s K Area.

Every week since 1996 the Board’s “Resident Inspectors” have submitted one-page reports to their Technical Director highlighting key safety issues at six major sites. A four to six-week gap between report submittal and public disclosure is normal, in part due to a DOE classification review. Prior to 2020, publication of reports containing classification redactions was rare to absent.

The inspectors began making reporting entries regarding Savannah River Site’s COVID-19 preparations, response, workforce status, and status of Mission Critical Programs (1) on March 13, 2020.

By April 3rd they had reported the first cases on-site. By April 17th, only thirty percent of the operational workforce (outside of the Centerra paramilitary security force) was reported to be working on site. By then, SRS had entered into a “Essential Mission Critical Operations” status, which limited personnel to “performing duties directly supporting SRS primary mission essential functions, mission essential functions, or essential supporting activities such as tritium operations and safe and secure storage in K- and L-Areas. This status will result in less than 2500 employees working at SRS.”

After eight more weeks of basic reporting, mostly involving the number of positive cases and quarantine figures, an entry in the June 12th report was classified as “Official Use Only” and redacted in full.

There followed a more substantial, half-page redaction that accompanied the June 19th report , and short redacted paragraphs in the June 26th and July 10th reports.

A one-week gap in this censorship period occurred in the July 3rd report, when the inspectors submitted the following short paragraph:

“COVID-19 Update: Between June 25 and July 1, the number of positive tests for SRS employees increased from 52 to 62. As part of a lessons learned, SRS issued guidelines for the use of personal fans in office spaces to reduce the risk of transmission between employees.”

“Lessons Learned from Positive COVID-19 Cases at Savannah River Site,” was obtained from DOE via a FOIA request in late 2020. The July 1, 2020, report described and illustrated a few examples of how COVID-19 transmissions at SRS were occurring, particularly in crowded offices; but not necessarily at facilities where essential functions were performed.

The three-page report focused on the proper use of common fans and air conditioning window units in the workplace (Figures 2-4). As with the ubiquitous use of modular offices onsite, this was another indication that workplaces at high-tech SRS are often densely occupied (2), in steady need of increased office space, and sometimes lacking in reliable cooling systems. The report somewhat undermined DOE’s official position, as described by former Aiken Standard reporter Colin Demarest, that the “majority of infections” were due to “away-from-work ‘activities.’”

The Censorship Ends and Reports of Probable COVID-related Staff Shortages Begins.

Following the censorship period, reports of staff shortages at Defense Nuclear Facilities began that were undoubtedly COVID-related; but the word COVID was absent.

The August 7th submittal was the first of these normal, unredacted reports to address staffing shortages while omitting any mention of COVID. The report contained a short entry at the bottom of the page, pertaining to “Technical Safety Requirements (TSR) Minimum Staffing,” that stated:

“Two of the three qualified shift operations managers (SOM) at a defense nuclear facility are unavailable. At this facility, the TSRs require a qualified SOM to be responsible for the facility command function during certain activities. A second facility will be operated for one shift a day because of availability issues with four of the six qualified SOMs.”

A more specific entry referencing a staffing shortage of “40+ staff” at the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) was made in the September 4th report. (Figure 5). Just two weeks earlier, the SWPF had finally been authorized to begin operations, which officially began on September 20th.

The September 11th report also identified a smaller staffing shortage of 15 workers at the SWPF, which included “two shift technical engineers, two senior supervisory watch personnel, and another manager.” The shortages were sufficient enough to cause suspension of all “non-essential work.”

The December 11th report identified an entire shift being unavailable at F-H Laboratory, requiring personnel to work overtime to fill the shift needs. The shortage occurred during a month with 425 positive cases—-more than one third of the cumulative total (1207) in 2020.

Subsequent reports further suggest that DOE’s censorship of COVID-related impacts was primarily limited to staffing shortages in Mission Critical Programs.

The Board’s Resident Inspectors were allowed by DOE to associate COVID with deferred and cancelled emergency management drills and deferred maintenance tasks. A few examples included:

January 29, 2021: A review of the operational impacts of COVID-19 on concluded, in part, that in “many cases, the impact was minor, temporary, or reasonable considering the circumstances.” One of the primary concerns was the cancellation of most emergency operations field drills. The inspectors later reported that nearly 20 percent of personnel in emergency response organizations did not participate in a single drill in 2020.

February 5, 2021: A two-fold increase in preventative maintenance deferrals, from 70 to 145, between March and May 2020; with 82 deferrals in May 2020 being COVID-related. That figure was reduced to only five by December 2020.

The DNFSB Position on a Request for Uncensored Reports

In December 2023, a FOIA request was submitted (2) to the DNFSB to provide unredacted versions of the four censored Summer of 2020 reports. The reasoning was that three years had passed and the public has a right to know what cumulative impacts the COVID-19 pandemic had on SRS operations and site safety, if any.

The DNFSB responded with an April 15, 2024, letter from its Chief FOIA Officer explaining that DOE was being asked to “consult with the DNFSB with regard to releasing the COVID-19 information” because for “FOIA purposes, it is DOE’s information.”

Attached to the letter was the FOIA Officer’s consultation request to DOE (Figure 6), which stated, in part, that:

Each of the four reports contains a paragraph (highlighted) that deals with the presence and effects of COVID-19 at the facility. DNFSB’s position at the time the reports were drafted was, and remains, that the reports should have been made public in their entirety. This was not done. DOE insisted at the time that as a matter of Departmental policy such COVID-19 related information was deemed to be for official only. Because DOE’s equity in the information is superior to DNFSB’s the paragraphs at issue were redacted from the copies of the four reports posted to the Board’s public website.”

The consultation request went on to state that “DNFSB’s position continues to be that the reports should be released without redaction,” with the caveat that it is DOE’s decision as to whether the reports should be released in their entirety; an action that required a classification review.

The time frame for an answer is open-ended. The DNFSB advised in its letter to:

“Please be aware that we may not receive DOE’s reply for a considerable period of time.”

For now, a more complete public understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the safety of SRS operations will have to wait. The review process could take months, or even longer.

In the meantime, the paper trail to date suggests the redacted information pertains to localized staffing shortages at individual facilities that achieved levels that did not comply with technical safety requirements; and potentially compromised safety at individual facilities. If this was not the case, there appears to be even less justification to keeping secret what are now four-year old reports with no bearing on current site operations.

Footnotes

* Coverage of this story began in the Fall of 2020 and was reported in the Aiken SC News and Views Facebook group. After the redactions in the weekly reports remained after three years, the FOIA request for unredacted versions was made.

(1) Over the course of the year, the “Mission Critical” facilities requiring at constant staffing included the F and H Area Radioactive Waste “Tank Farms,” the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), hte Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF), H-Canyon, L-Area irradiated nuclear fuel storage, K-Area plutonium storage and waste production, and Savannah River National Laboratory’s (SRNL) onsite operations.

On March 30, 2020, Savannah River Site Watch (SRS Watch) submitted a FOIA request to DOE that asked for, in part, a list of “minimum mission-critical activities.”

DOE took nine months to provide a letter of response and two responsive documents:

a. Two pages of a 114-page manual, lightly redacted, that described five mission essential functions and 22 supporting activities.

b. A four-page Telework execution and implementation plan.

(2) Contained in SRS Watch correspondence with DOE was a letter to the editor from Aiken resident Kathy Glenn to the the Augusta Chronicle. Ms. Glenn wrote, in part:

“There are operators working in close quarters and many engineers in cubicles. The cubicle working environment is similar to being in a large airplane – all the air in the room is shared and sometimes four desks back up to the same cubicle wall. Some of the cubicles have two or three people sharing them, and they can get a maximum of about 3 feet away from one another. So many, many people are in the same room, sharing the same breathing air for nine hours a day, for days on end. It’s like flying in a plane but with the people just a little more spread-out, all breathing the same air.

This is putting the site mission at risk by increasing the odds that many of the personnel will get very sick. This is massively irresponsible.”

(3) The entire FOIA request read:

“I, Donald Moniak, hereby request the following documents in unredacted form: 

The DNFSB weekly resident staff reports for Savannah River Site, for weeks ending June 12, 20, 26, 2020; and July 10, 2020. 

These documents are now more than three years old. They were marked “official use” at the time. The reports likely involved the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on facility operations, since other unredacted reports around the same time identified minimum staffing requirement issues. These redactions also occurred at a time when the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic were being routinely reported by DNFSB resident staff at SRS. 

Because the information likely only involved operational conditions that are long past, the general public has a right to know what real impacts the pandemic had on SRS operations. 

Thank you, 

Donald Moniak