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Budget distribution comparison |
Chapter Three
Program Management
OCRWM Annual Report to Congress, FY 1996
OCRWM's managers faced a major challenge in accommodating the severe, unanticipated reduction in the Fiscal Year 1996 appropriation, which was 40 percent lower than the prior year's, while maintaining progress toward key milestones. Toward the end of Fiscal Year 1995, when it became evident that Fiscal Year 1996 funding would be sharply reduced, we took immediate action to cut spending so that we could preserve the program's ability to meet its legal obligations and avoid a funding deficit. We also had to determine how to narrow and redirect our activities to conform to congressional direction. To do this we carefully weighed several factors: 1) the long-term programmatic consequences of curtailing or terminating activities; 2) uncertainties concerning the magnitude of financial penalties we would incur in terminating contracts still in force; and 3) the various expectations and needs of the program's stakeholders.
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Budget distribution comparison |
The distribution of the budget cuts and the Fiscal Year 1997 appropriation is illustrated in the chart that accompanies this chapter. The major budgetary and programmatic consequences of the Fiscal Year 1996 appropriation and of our implementation of Congressional guidance were as follows:
Programmatically, we preserved activities essential to core tasks, narrowing contractor work scope accordingly and scaling back interactions with stakeholders. By May 1996, we had completed a revised Program Plan that defined our new direction. Managerially, we focused on numerous initiatives. To help Federal staff carry out their responsibilities with reduced contractor support, we worked to help them become more efficient, enhancing productivity through training and the application of information technology. We worked toward greater integration of technical issues across the program and with other programs in the Department. We also strengthened program and project control tools. By September, we had realigned OCRWM's organization to facilitate implementation of the revised Program Plan, streamlining the organization in the process and further improving our supervisor-to-employee ratio. And we have awarded a single contract for technical and management support services that will promote closer integration of the work of our headquarters management center in Washington, D.C., and the program's two business centers.
Strengthening Management Controls
We use baselines that document program cost, schedule, and work scope to measure program performance, so that we can ensure that work is performed on schedule and within budget. During Fiscal Year 1996, we completed the revision of those baselines and of the program's work breakdown structure, schedule networks, and bases of cost estimates, to ensure that they support our revised Program Plan.
A Department-wide initiative to overhaul the way projects are managed will simplify and strengthen OCRWM's management controls. The Department has replaced highly prescriptive project management requirements with a flexible life-cycle assets management approach that will clarify OCRWM and contractor accountability for project performance. To implement this new approach, OCRWM is establishing a single integrated, more effective, system for managing the program's elements--the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project; the Waste Acceptance, Storage, and Transportation Project; and the Program Management Center--and the contractors that support them. This system will be documented in the Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Strategic System Integrated Management Policy.
As part of this initiative, we implemented an improved financial management system in Fiscal Year 1996 that provides more rapid access to more current data on the program's financial status.
Because OCRWM's program continues to evolve technically and because the regulatory requirements it must meet also evolve, we must continually work to ensure that the program remains technically integrated and continues to meet regulatory requirements.
Integrating the elements of the complex and evolving Federal waste management system is a major technical and managerial challenge. Those elements, singly and together, must perform in a manner that is safe, efficient, reliable, and cost-effective. This means that waste acceptance, storage, transportation, and disposal functions must be evaluated as a unified system to ensure that decisions made about one element are compatible with all others. Unless system-wide impacts are adequately assessed, a unilateral change to one element that affects others could jeopardize licensing and certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, resulting in costly design changes and serious schedule delays. Moreover, a system not properly integrated is unlikely to operate efficiently.
To ensure technical integration, we use a systems engineering and integration approach that employs systems integration, system studies and analysis, and baseline management. These tools equip us to examine issues with cross-cutting, program-wide impacts.
DOE-owned radioactive materials
During Fiscal Year 1996, we continued to evaluate the impact of accepting a variety of DOE-owned spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste. We have been working with DOE's Office of Environmental Management (EM), the current custodian of these materials, to ensure that the waste being considered for disposal in a geologic repository will meet statutory and regulatory requirements.
In June 1996, we revised the program baseline to incorporate disposal of DOE-owned spent fuel. On a metric-ton-uranium basis, DOE spent fuel includes mostly N-reactor fuel from the Hanford, Washington, site. It also includes a smaller amount of naval reactor fuel, research reactor fuel, and miscellaneous other spent nuclear fuels from the DOE complex. To support incorporation of these fuels into the technical baseline, we developed preliminary waste acceptance specifications for them.
OCRWM and EM collaborated through a DOE Spent Nuclear Fuel Steering Group and on several EM-sponsored task teams to evaluate technical strategies for interim management and ultimate disposition of DOE-owned spent fuel. Support was provided to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) task team, which is planning criticality and total system performance analyses for INEL spent fuel in Fiscal Year 1997.
In June 1996, the Department issued its technical strategy for management of aluminum-based research reactor spent fuel, focusing heavily on disposal-based considerations.
OCRWM continued to determine what additional data about DOE-owned spent fuel and high-level waste are needed to design and operate the civilian radioactive waste management system. Total system performance assessment, repository design, storage, and transportation systems are the subjects of concern.
As the Department's policy evolved for disposing of other waste materials--such as weapons-usable fissile material declared surplus to national defense needs--we continued to interact with other programs in the Department to evaluate disposal options.
Because we terminated development of the multi-purpose canister system, we removed it from the program baseline. We completed the simplification of the headquarters technical baseline to focus only on key policy, technical, and interface requirements that control the performance of the Waste Acceptance, Storage, and Transportation Project and the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project. Responsibility for management and control of technical requirements was delegated to these projects.
To support our market-driven strategy for obtaining waste acceptance, storage, and transportation services from private vendors, we drafted acceptance criteria for commercial spent nuclear fuel canisters, which will serve as the preliminary basis for canister/cask specifications for transportation procurements. We also conducted a systems study evaluating the impacts on the waste management system of different storage facility spent fuel handling capabilities and of acceptance of a variety of transportation casks and canisters.
To procure the casks, canisters, and overpacks that will be needed to ship, store, and dispose of spent nuclear fuel, we need design specifications for vendors. The task of developing specifications that can accommodate every spent fuel assembly already discharged and projected to be discharged by nuclear power plants, that meet stringent regulatory requirements, and that serve three different operational modes--storage, transport, and disposal--poses a considerable challenge. In Fiscal Year 1996, we completed analyses exploring issues associated with defining a full and integrated set of design specifications for fuel that will be accepted by the waste management system.
Other studies and analyses included cost comparisons of single-purpose canisters versus dual-purpose canisters for fuel stored at utility sites, analyses of the sensitivity of program costs to various cask and canister options being considered for procurement, and design inputs to the generic Interim Storage Facility Topical Safety Analysis Report and the viability assessment of siting a repository at the Yucca Mountain site. The design inputs include bounding predictions of the types, contents, and annual numbers of casks, canisters, and waste packages that may be handled.
Thermal loading and backfill systems studies undertaken for the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project are described in Chapter One.
The OCRWM-wide Configuration Information System was completed, integrated, tested, and made fully operational. It supports the program-wide configuration management process by accurately documenting the identification and description of the facilities, sites, structures, systems, interfaces, components, hardware, and software of the waste management system. It also helps to ensure that proposed changes to systems and components are appropriate, controlled, and technically sound, and it supports reporting on the status of program components and on verification activities.
Regulatory integration
Our regulatory integration efforts encompassed several tasks: 1) ensuring compliance with all applicable Federal statutes and regulations and with Departmental orders and directives, and ensuring consistency with the environmental impact statements of other programs within the Department; 2) interacting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on matters related to repository licensing, licensing of an interim storage facility, and certification of storage and transportation casks for spent fuel; and 3) revising the siting guidelines for the repository. These last two tasks are discussed in Chapters One and Two.
In Fiscal Year 1996, we reviewed and participated in the preparation of four Departmental programmatic and project-specific Environmental Impact Statements, to ensure consistency with OCRWM's revised Program Plan. We also reviewed the Department's draft Technical Resource Manual for Environmental Justice Determinations and participated in the Departmental Working Group to support the requirements of Executive Order 12898 on environmental justice.
Assuring the Quality of Our Work
To satisfy Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for obtaining licenses for waste management system facilities, all work that affects the near- and long-term radiological safety of the system is being performed under stringent quality assurance standards. Our commitment to performing all nuclear safety-related work in compliance with quality assurance requirements is intended to protect the environment and the health and safety of workers and the public.
During Fiscal Year 1996, OCRWM's Office of Quality Assurance continued to audit and assess nuclear safety-related activities to verify that quality assurance standards were being met. These quality checks confirmed that applicable Federal regulations, codes, standards, and Departmental orders had been properly identified and implemented. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the State of Nevada, and affected units of local government typically observe our audits and make many valuable suggestions. As a result of these audits, we were able to remedy problems and further improve the quality assurance process.
Quality assurance audits and assessments during Fiscal Year 1996 covered the full scope of operations at the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office, including work supporting design and construction of the Exploratory Studies Facility and scientific work associated with the site viability assessment. In addition, we performed audits of various vendors supplying goods and services to us.
Improvements in the Quality Assurance Program continued. We completed the implementation of a consolidated, program-wide corrective action system that tracks corrective action in progress and allows program-wide analysis to identify adverse quality trends. We also consolidated the quality assurance management assessment process to provide standardized assessments across the entire OCRWM program. This has resulted in a consistent assessment methodology that is more efficient and effective than the previous approach.
We continued to interface with EM's High-Level Waste and National Spent Nuclear Fuel Programs. This interface is intended to ensure that they appropriately apply OCRWM's quality assurance requirements to activities related to DOE-owned spent fuel and vitrified high-level waste that is slated for disposal in the civilian repository.
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OCRWM organization chart |
To carry out our revised Program Plan and to meet the management demands of coping with a significantly diminished budget and reduced contractor support, we took a number of steps. We realigned our organization, consolidating all program management and administration functions in a single office. We restructured the Office of Waste Acceptance, Storage, and Transportation so that it can better focus on development and implementation of a market-driven approach to acceptance, storage, and transportation of spent nuclear fuel. We restructured the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office to focus resources on work leading to the site viability assessment, conducting scientific investigations of the Yucca Mountain site, and "daylighting" the Tunnel Boring Machine.
The result of the restructuring was the elimination of three offices and two divisions, and elimination of nine supervisory positions, which further improved the supervisor-to-employee ratio from one to six, to one to nine.
OCRWM's full-time-equivalent staffing level is now 203; of these positions, 103 are located at headquarters and 100 at the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office. An additional 22 are assigned to other DOE organizations that provide matrix support to OCRWM. With a relatively small staff responsible for a large, complex, and evolving program, in recent years it has become ever more important to increase staff efficiency. Reduced contractor support coupled with budget cuts made the issue of staff productivity even more acute in Fiscal Year 1996. We responded by placing greater reliance on training, information technology, and other management tools.
We continued to support career development opportunities through formal training, rotational assignments, mentoring, and personnel details. In a collaborative effort by employees, supervisors, and managers, Individual Development Plans were established for OCRWM employees, to guide training and staff development.
To demonstrate OCRWM's commitment to recognizing employees' contributions to the program, we implemented a campaign to acknowledge employees who have excelled in the areas of communication and team-building. OCRWM has also participated in award programs offered by the Department, such as job performance awards, special or service awards, on-the-spot awards, and numerous non-monetary awards.
In the summer of 1995, anticipating a sharply reduced Fiscal Year 1996 appropriation, we took steps to narrow contractor work scope and eliminate contractor jobs, primarily within the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project. In November, because Congress withheld $85 million pending authorizing legislation for the development of an interim storage facility, we eliminated more contractor jobs, primarily in functions related to the Waste Acceptance, Storage, and Transportation Project and program management and administration. As a consequence of these reductions, M&O contractor staff full-time-equivalents declined by approximately 30 percent. During Fiscal Year 1996, we also successfully responded to the Secretary of Energy's Strategic Alignment Initiative mandating support service contract cost reductions; we reduced these costs by over 25 percent. Overall, approximately 900 contractor full-time-equivalent positions were eliminated.
We also awarded a contract to consolidate all program-wide management and technical support services, and thus to promote better integration of activities between headquarters and the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project in Las Vegas, Nevada.
For several years OCRWM has been a leader in the application of information technologies, not only within the Department but within the Federal Government. Building on the Information Management Strategic Plan we issued in Fiscal Year 1995, we developed and released an Information Management (IM) Multi-Year Program Plan in Fiscal Year 1996. It describes work scope, summary-level funding estimates, and major actions and milestones required over a 5-year period to support the objectives defined in OCRWM's draft Program Plan, Revision 1, and the strategic goals set forth in the IM Strategic Plan. Based on the IM Multi-Year Program Plan, we issued our first integrated IM annual planning guidance for Fiscal Year 1997. Collectively, these planning activities ensure that IM products and services will support OCRWM's goals and objectives and enhance staff productivity and efficiency.
We continued work to implement a program-wide information architecture that will serve as the blueprint upon which all of OCRWM's data, information, and information systems are defined, organized, developed, accessed, maintained, and managed. It is also designed to be supportive of, and consistent with, the Department's information architecture, and to maximize the efficient use of information technologies. Our focus in Fiscal Year 1997 will be on establishing a comprehensive information architecture baseline and ensuring that it is well-managed.
By institutionalizing the use of information technology we have realized significant improvements in our business processes, greater employee productivity, and better program integration. For example, a suite of new information systems has boosted the rapid response and internal/external communications capability of the OCRWM Director's office. The centralized Correspondence Tracking System has eliminated a multitude of stand-alone, mostly manual systems; streamlined the control process; shortened processing time by up to 94 percent; and raised the percentage of timely responses to external correspondence from 51 percent to 91 percent. And our Controlled Milestone Reporting System enables us to monitor progress against key program milestones. Several other Departmental organizations and Federal agencies have adopted some of OCRWM's information technology applications, or adapted them to meet their own needs.
We are contributing to greater employee productivity by providing and maintaining electronic mail, videoconferencing, and electronic-calendar capabilities. We have also made progress in identifying and eliminating duplicative information systems. A case in point is the consolidation of four program-wide management and administrative systems into one Information Products Database, which makes completed and published OCRWM documents instantly available to all OCRWM users.
We continued to implement our information management performance assessment and improvement program, which facilitates compliance with statutes, regulations, and directives, and promotes the continuous improvement of our information management practices. We also strengthened the records management system that is essential to our ability to obtain licenses for waste management system facilities, by issuing a supplemental order that establishes and clarifies goals, objectives, responsibilities, and procedures for it. In Fiscal Year 1997, we will continue to enhance our records management system and prepare records for loading into the Licensing Support System that will facilitate the repository licensing process
