Former Department of Energy official Dr. Rita Baranwal broke a year of social media silence this week to announce that she is filling a senior position at the Electric Power Research Institute, her new professional home post-Trump administration.
Baranwal joined the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) as the chief nuclear officer and vice president of the institute’s nuclear energy portfolio, she said Wednesday in a Tweet. She joined the organization days after her Jan. 8 resignation as assistant secretary at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
I took few days off but am 😊 to get back to #EnergyTwitter and #nucleartwitter. Thrilled to be on the @EPRINews team, providing science-based nuclear R&D to more than 80% of the world’s commercial nuclear fleet. https://t.co/6A8Z6NMPOL
— Dr. Rita Baranwal (@RitaB66) January 21, 2021
In this new position Baranwal will be “providing science-based nuclear R&D to more than 80% of the world’s commercial nuclear fleet,” she said in her Tweet.
Baranwal has some history in a setting like that. From 2016 to 2019, she was director of the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program at the Idaho National Laboratory. The program is an incubator for nuclear-energy technologies that the government hopes can be applied commercially..
EPRI’s nuclear portfolio also has a sizable program dedicated to high-level radioactive waste management and storage.
That includes research on “technical issues related to fuel reprocessing.” During her time at DOE, Baranwal was a vocal proponent of spent fuel reprocessing.
In a video interview with RadWaste Monitor Friday, Baranwal described some of the nonprofit’s research on innovative tech for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.
One project that Baranwal said she was excited about was the institute’s High Burnup Nuclear Fuel Storage Demonstration Project. EPRI collaborated with the Department of Energy on this research, which aims to “reduce the amount of time that [nuclear] fuel stays in a spent fuel pool,” Baranwal said. The results of this project could save nuke plants up to $75 million each per year, she said.
As far as permanent storage solutions are concerned, the institute previously produced research on geological repositories, but hasn’t published any new work since funding for the Yucca Mountain project was pulled in 2011, Baranwal said.
EPRI has also informed vendors on the use of robots for storage site inspection and sensors to monitor storage sites and waste transport, Baranwal said.
“I have been in innovation for almost my entire career in the nuclear industry,” Baranwal said. “It’s certainly an honor to be able to lead a lot of this cutting edge research that EPRI does.”