Obama appointees depart as Biden staffs up Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board

Steven Becker, Allen Croff, Tissa Illangasekare and Kenneth Peddicord left the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board Friday as part of a major membership facelift finalized last week by President Joe Biden.

A board spokesperson confirmed the four people had left in an email sent Tuesday to the Exchange Monitor. The White House on Friday said it was appointing six new members to the board, filling 10 of its 11 seats.

The administration’s announcement did not say who was staying and who was going, but with 11 total seats and three vacancies before Friday’s announcement, the addition of six new members meant something would had to give.

With the latest appointments, all but two board members will, if they choose, serve at least through the first term of the next U.S. President, who voters will choose on Nov. 5.

The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board is a small, independent federal agency that acts as a sort of technical consultant and peer reviewer to Department of Energy nuclear-waste programs. Members are selected from a short list prepared by the National Academy of Sciences, serve part time and have four-year terms.

The board’s roster now includes:

Newly appointed members appointed Friday to four-year terms that will expire in 2028:

• 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.

Board members reappointed Friday to four-year terms that will expire in 2028.

• Nathan Siu, the immediate past chair.
• Scott Tyler.

Board members appointed in 2022 and serving four-year terms that will expire in 2026

• Ron Ballinger.
• Brian Woods.

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.