[DOE LETTERHEAD]
NATIONAL NUCLEAR
SECURITY ADMINISTRATION
February 4, 2003
The Honorable John T. Conway
Chairman
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
625 Indiana Avenue, N.W.
Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20004
Dear Mr. Chairman:
The Implementation Plan for Defense Nuclear
Facilities Safety Board Recommendation 97-2, Criticality Safety,
requires quarterly status reports.
Enclosed is the Department of Energy’s quarterly status report for the
first quarter of Fiscal Year 2003.
The Implementation Plan contains 30
milestones, all of which have now been completed. Although all commitments have
been met, stability of funding for the Nuclear Criticality Safety Program has
been an ongoing concern. With the
Secretary’s decision for Defense Program to fully fund and manage the Nuclear
Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2003 and beyond,
stability of funding should be achieved.
Although the continuing resolution has limited budget allocations to FY
2002 levels, I remain committed to providing adequate funding for the program
once Congress approves a final FY 2003 budget.
The FY 2004 budget request has been adjusted to provide sufficient
funding to meet NCSP requirements.
The NCSP continues to sustain progress in
all of the program task areas as reflected in the body of the enclosed
report. In addition, I want to inform
you about our completion of a Technical Report # 29, Criticality Safety,
commitment that was made in a Secretarial letter to you on
May 30, 2001:
“The Department will promulgate the Deputy Secretary’s self-assessment
criteria as a DOE Standard. Additional
criteria will be added to address needs cited in Sections 3.b and 3.c above,
and to address needs cited in Sections 5 and 8 below.” [Section 3.b of the Enclosure to the Secretarial letter affirmed the
preference for engineered controls over administrative controls; Section 3. c
affirmed the need for performance metrics and the need to periodically assess
engineered controls; Section 5 affirmed the need to establish a robust process
for vertically tracing criticality controls; and Section 8 affirmed the need to
formalize a common framework for contractor criticality safety self-assessment
programs.]
Dr. Jerry McKamy transformed the Deputy
Secretary’s self assessment criteria into DOE-STD-1158-2002, Self-Assessment
Standard for DOE Contractor Criticality Safety Programs, which was
published in November 2002. This new
standard addresses all items cited in the commitment (above). Your staff participated in the review
process and their comments were included in the final version of the
Standard. With completion of this
action, all Technical Report #29 commitments have been met.
If you have any questions, please contact me
directly or have your staff contact Mike Thompson at 301-903-5648.
Sincerely,
David H. Crandall
Assistant Deputy Administrator
for Research, Development, and Simulation
Defense Programs
cc (w/encl):
M. Whitaker, S-3.1
E. Beckner, NA- 10
L. Brooks, NA-1