The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), an independent nuclear safety oversight board within the federal government, is under fire. Created by Congress in 1988 with the goal of protecting the health and safety of the public and defense nuclear facility employees across the nuclear weapons complex, DNFSB does not possess the authority to perform outright regulation. Rather, it provides the Secretary of Energy with formal recommendations, to which the Department of Energy (DOE) is required to respond. Prior to DNFSB’s authorization, the DOE had no external oversight and its nuclear facilities had a long history of worker exposures, accidents that released radiation into the environment, radiation releases that were covered up and close calls in its nuclear facilities that could have been major nuclear catastrophes.
After decades of providing essential oversight that resulted in a reduction in risk at these sites, the DNFSB is facing several challenges accomplishing its oversight mission, centered around the fact that it recently lost quorum. The Board is meant to host a five member panel of nuclear safety experts, and to operate in its full oversight capacity, must have a quorum of at least 3 members. Additionally, DNFSB is required to maintain a sense of political equilibrium (equal number of Democrats and Republicans). Board members are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Unfortunately, as of October 2025, the Board is down to just one sitting member, radiation protection and nuclear safety expert Patricia Lee, a democratic nomination. Neither President Trump nor Senate Republicans have made any push to nominate or confirm a new board member since quorum was lost.
As a result, DBFSB’s July 2026 Report to Congress on Denials of Information reported that it is currently experiencing “the most significant” access challenges in its history, including “verbal and written denials from DOE.” Due to this inaccessibility, DNFSB has struggled to conduct various safety reviews, and has “not been provided access to large numbers of draft DOE safety directives and regulations that are currently being revised.”
DNFSB sent a letter to the Secretary of Energy in April of this year identifying the access denials that DNFSB was facing up to that point. In that letter, DNFSB requested a more collaborative path forward, and asked for Secretarial determinations with regards to the aforementioned access denials. DNFSB provided DOE with a timeframe of one month to respond to this letter. It has yet to hear back.
The enabling legislation that created the DNFSB’s requires the Secretary of Energy to “fully cooperate in providing prompt and unfettered access to facilities, personnel, and information as the Board considers necessary to carry out its oversight responsibilities in support of the safe execution of DOE’s vital national security and radioactive waste cleanup missions.” While DOE has mostly abided by this requirement since the Board’s inception in 1988, significant access challenges were experienced in 2021.
Following that, Congress directed DNFSB and DOE to develop a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), aimed at creating a process by which the two agencies could work together moving forward to ensure that DNFSB is able to access the materials necessary to fulfill its oversight mission. This MOU was finalized in 2022, but DNFSB alleges that many of the access denials it currently faces are “inconsistent with the approved MOU.” This is especially alarming considering that this increase in access denial comes alongside the push to increase nuclear weapons production across DOE sites.
Some of the meetings and information that DNFSB has recently been denied access to include NNSA safety and operations calls with individual DOE sites, safety-basis schedule updates, meetings regarding infrastructure upgrades, and other meetings likely to discuss high-hazard activities. DNFSB presence at these is crucial for effective nuclear safety oversight. Importantly, as it relates to the enhanced plutonium utilization plan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), DOE has failed to provide DNFSB with the requested draft action plan for the Plutonium Pit Production Matrixed Execution Team, intended to improve pit production. NNSA has failed to either deliver the document, or explicitly deny the request, leaving DNFSB completely out of the loop and unable to offer safety advice or recommendations with regard to the project.
On July 24, 2026, DNFSB wrote again to the Secretary of Energy, alleging that, “In creating the Board, the Senate Armed Services Committee stated that, ‘the Board must have a primary mission to identify the nature and consequences of any significant potential threats to public health and safety, to elevate such issues to the highest levels of authority, and to inform the public.” DNFSB then notes that it was recently informed that DOE would no longer review draft Board documents for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). This would limit future reviews to Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information (UCNI), undermining the DOE’s responsibility in protection of otherwise sensitive information. It additionally constitutes a departure from the aforementioned MOU.
DNFSB further stated in this letter that, “DOE’s sensitivity review of Board drafts prior to public disclosure has been effective at protecting DOE information throughout the Board’s history. This cooperation has enabled the Board to publicly release its safety oversight products including, Board correspondence to DOE and Congress, technical reports, resident inspector weekly reports, and cognizant engineer monthly reports, in a timely manner consistent with our statutory mission.” DNFSB ultimately requested the Secretary of Energy’s assistance in identifying a path forward, and restoring effective and transparent processes between DNFSB and DOE.
Amidst these issues, DNFSB staff is conducting a national tour going to communities around the sites it monitors. It will be holding a public meeting in Livermore at 5pm on September 15 at the Livermore Library at 1188 S. Livermore Ave. Tri-Valley CARES will be there – Join us!
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