Environment, Safety, and Health: Status of DOE's Reorganization of it's SafetyOversight Function

摘要

Since the early 1980s, a number of studies have identified numerousenvironmental, safety, and health problems within DOE's nuclear facilities. A common concern of those studies was DOE's inability to effectively address safety within its nuclear reactor programs. DOE did little to address these problems before 1985. However, since 1985 DOE has taken various actions including (1) establishing the office of Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health to provide independent internal oversight of DOE nuclear facilities and (2) creating an advisory committee for independent external safety oversight. Despite these actions, the Secretary of Energy, upon taking office in 1989, concluded that the safety oversight system at DOE was still a failure because of the confusion of responsibility for safety among its various offices. To address this problem, he proposed a new organizational and restructuring plan for nuclear and nonnuclear safety. DOE's proposed restructing plan will (1) transfer responsibility for monitoring safety at DOE facilities among various DOE offices within DOE to independently oversee safety. External boards will provide outside, independent safety oversight. One of the major principles behind the plan is that line management will be held accountable for safety as well as achieving production goals. DOE is still developing the regulations to implement the restructing plan and has reserved the right to announce further realignments.