The Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy and Grid Deployment offices got new chiefs of staff, the agency announced this week.
Emily Doran, a former campaign staffer for President Joe Biden (D), will be the staff chief at the Grid Deployment Office while Rory Stanley, most recently a staffer on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, will step into the same role at the Office of Nuclear Energy, DOE said in a press release.
The Exchange Monitor previously reported Stanley’s move to DOE from Capitol Hill, which Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced on the Senate floor in July.
In 2023, both the Nuclear Energy and Grid Deployment offices are wound up with active and shuttered nuclear power plants.
The Office of Nuclear Energy, though largely limited by law, is ramping up a program to select a federally owned and operated site for interim storage of spent nuclear fuel. The effort leans large on DOE’s still-nascent consent-based siting process, which through a $26-million round of grant funding to 13 groups is in the early stages of defining what consent means and who may give it.
Two U.S. states, New Mexico and Texas, have outlawed the storage and transportation of spent nuclear fuel in their territories. In August, a federal judge ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot license commercial companies to store spent fuel, killing, at least temporarily, proposals to build fuel depots in New Mexico and Texas.
The Grid Deployment office, meanwhile, is in charge of DOE’s Civilian Nuclear Credit program: a $6-billion, competitively awarded bailout for financially troubled nuclear power plants. The Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California won the first round of credits in 2022. The office last week told the Exchange Monitor that it had not awarded credits under the program’s second round, yet.
Grid Deployment once hoped to get the round-two awards out by Aug. 29.
