President Joe Biden (D) on Friday said he would nominate six people to serve on the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
The board is a sort of technical consultant and peer reviewer for Department of Energy programs related to both high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants. Members serve four-year terms and potential members are selected from a list compiled by the National Academy of Sciences.
The board may have up to eleven members and currently has three vacancies. Board members serve part time and do not have to be confirmed by the Senate.
It was not immediately clear which members would depart. Four of the current members, Steven Becker, Allen Croff, Tissa Illangasekare and Kenneth Peddicord, were appointed by President Barack Obama (D). Biden appointed the other four.
Biden also said Friday that he would replace the board’s current chair, Nathan Siu. Biden appointed Siu to the board in 2022.
The six new nominees are:
- Peter Swift, who would be the board’s new chair. He most recently worked at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and previously assisted with licensing both DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., and the since-defunded Yucca Mountain repository in Nye County, Nev.
- Richelle Allen, a professor of Geological Sciences at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
- Lake Barrett, the former head of the Department of Energy’s now-shuttered Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste Management.
- Miles Greiner, a Foundation Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno.
- Silvia Jurisson, a former professor of chemistry and radiology at the University of Missouri.
- Seth Tuler, an associate professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies Division at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and a senior research fellow at the Social and Environmental Research Institute
Congress created the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board in the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1987.
The board was not supposed to exist forever.
In the law that created the body, Congress wrote that the “Board shall cease to exist not later than 1 year after the date on which the Secretary [of Energy] begins disposal of high-level radioactive waste or spent fuel in a repository.”
Meanwhile, Yucca Mountain is politically blockaded by Nevada politicians on both sides of the aisle and the U.S. Supreme Court, an independent branch of the federal government, is reviewing the legality of commercial interim storage of spent nuclear fuel after a lower court effectively banned the burgeoning practice in 2023.
