The Energy Department should maintain control of the national laboratories responsible for developing, maintaining and securing the nation’s nuclear arsenal, according to a study released Friday.
The study by the National Research Council, which was mandated by Congress, contradicts in some ways the findings of an advisory panel also chartered by Congress that recommended in November that the parent agency of the laboratories, the National Nuclear Security Administration, be transformed into an independent, Cabinet-level office.
The 60-page study, in its introduction, acknowledges it is dealing with a controversial topic, saying: “This is a period of unusual ferment and debate with regard to governance issues relating to DOE, NNSA and all of DOE’s national laboratories, including the three NNSA laboratories.”
But the study’s authors also note that several other panels are looking into the issues and said their recommendations were limited to the governance of the NNSA laboratories involved in the nuclear weapons program.
The report said “it would create more problems than it would solve” for control of the NNSA laboratories to be shared by multiple agencies. Instead, it recommends keeping the laboratories under the Energy Department’s sole control with a clearly defined mission statement and a more formal partnership with other agencies.
NNSA also is responsible for nuclear reactors on Navy ships and submarines, nuclear nonproliferation and emergency response to a radiological or nuclear incident.
The agency has been dogged by controversy over its mission and how it’s been run for years, in spite of efforts at reform.
A National Research Council study in 2012 found that an intrusive degree of oversight stemming from past security and safety concerns at one of the laboratories — Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — had led to a “breakdown of trust” between the labs and the NNSA that threatened the quality of the work they were doing, and said NNSA had lost confidence in the labs’ ability to “maintain operation goals such as safety, security, environmental responsibility and fiscal integrity.”
And the congressional advisory committee found in its November report that efforts at reform had not gone far enough since then.
“One unmistakable conclusion is that NNSA governance reform, at least as it has been implemented, has failed to provide the effective, mission-focused enterprise that Congress intended. The necessary fixes will not be simple or quick, and they must address systemic problems in both management practices and culture that exist across the nuclear enterprise,” the panel concluded in November, before recommending that the agency be spun off from the Energy Department into an independent, Cabinet-level Office of Nuclear Security.
Among the concerns raised were blurred lines of accountability, a dysfunctional relationship with the Pentagon — its major customer — and a loss of focus from shifting spending priorities after the Cold War from which the agency has not yet fully recovered.
“The end of the Cold War was almost as if we had all heaved a sigh of collective relief and said thank goodness we don’t have to worry about that anymore,” NNSA Administrator Frank G. Klotz told defense writers at a breakfast in October. “As a result of that, I think, the attention, the focus and the resources that were given to our nuclear deterrent forces were not what they were in the past.”
Congress gave NNSA until March to respond to the advisory panel’s recommendations.
