[DOE
LETTERHEAD]
May 12, 2004
The Honorable John T. Conway
Chairman
Defense Nuclear Facilities
Safety Board
625 Indiana Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20004-2941
Dear Mr. Chairman:
In January 2004, the Department
reported interim completion of Commitment 4.2.1.3 in the Department’s
Implementation Plan for Software Quality Assurance (SQA) in response to Board
Recommendation 2002-1. This commitment
required the Department to conduct a gap analysis to determine the actions
needed to bring the six toolbox codes into compliance with SQA criteria and to
develop a schedule with milestones to upgrade each code based on the gap
analysis results.
The Department has completed
additional code developer and peer reviews to further improve the accuracy of
the gap analysis effort as described in the Secretary’s letter to you on May 3,
2004. The attached final gap analyses
reports for the MACCS2, ALOHA, EPICODE, MELCOR, GENII, and CFAST toolbox codes
are complete. While SQA improvement
actions are recommended for the six toolbox codes, no evidence has been found
of programming, logic, or other types of software errors that would have led to
non-conservatisms at defense nuclear facilities. In parallel with completion of these reports,
we have contacted each of the code developers and will be evaluating further improvement
actions, as described in the Secretary’s May 3, 2004 letter.
The Guidance Reports for each of
these codes are being finalized by the end of the month and provide information
to users on the effective use of these codes. Questions concerning this commitment may be
directed to Chip Lagdon at (301)
903-4218 or me at (301)
903-8008.
Sincerely,
Frank B. Russo
Deputy Assistant Secretary
for Corporate Performance
Assessment
Attachments
cc:
Mark B. Whitaker, DR-1
Richard H. Lagdon, EH-31