Assessment of the Pantex Plant 2017 Full-Scale Exercise
Office of Enterprise Assessments
June 19, 2017
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June 2017
Assessment of the Pantex Plant 2017 Full-Scale Exercise
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Emergency Management Assessments, within the independent Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA), conducted an assessment of the Pantex Plant 2017 full-scale exercise, Chaos-17, from February 7 – March 9, 2017. The purpose of the exercise was to test and validate the effectiveness of the emergency response organization (ERO) in accordance with the currently published emergency plan and procedures. Chaos-17 was also intended to validate the complete set of newly developed plans and procedures developed in accordance with the DOE Implementation Plan (IP) responding to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Recommendation 2015-1, Emergency Preparedness and Response at the Pantex Plant, as well as to validate corrective actions addressing EA findings from the Consolidated Nuclear Security, LLC (CNS) 2014 full-scale exercise. However, CNS had not completed several key documents in time for this 2017 exercise and used the existing approved documents for the event response in cases where the revised documents were not available. EA performed this assessment at the request of the National Nuclear Security Administration Production Office (NPO) to provide an interim independent assessment of CNS progress and effectiveness in using the newly developed plans and procedures.