Rita Baranwal, who made headlines in her Department of Energy tenure as a voice for the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, resigned last Friday as President Donald Trump’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy.
Baranwal announced the decision on the official twitter account for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which by Monday she no longer controlled.
“It has been an absolute honor to serve in this capacity to help advance our U.S. nuclear energy R&D,” Baranwal tweeted on the official account before turning the keys over. “I plan to continue to use my talents to promote, lead and advance our nation’s largest source of clean energy so that our nation and my family will have a cleaner and more sustainable planet to protect.”
Today is my last day as Assistant Secretary of @GovNuclear. It has been an absolute honor to serve in this capacity to help advance our U.S. nuclear energy R&D.
— U.S. Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy 🇺🇸 (@DOE_NE1) January 8, 2021
Baranwal was sworn in to DOE in July 2019. She left a little more than a week before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Biden has said he will appoint former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm Secretary of Energy, but he has not announced lower-level DOE staff picks.
Baranwal, who made lively use of Twitter while running the Office of Nuclear Energy, sometimes said of spent nuclear fuel, “it’s only waste if you waste it:” a slogan the nuclear industry has cheered. Yet during the Trump administration, neither DOE nor any other part of the government made much headway toward reversing the decades-long, U.S. status quo of doing nothing with spent fuel but leaving it at the sites that created it.
It’s only waste if you waste it! https://t.co/OfvQAN9vjQ
— U.S. Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy 🇺🇸 (@DOE_NE1) May 19, 2020
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission suspended a limited spent fuel reprocessing rulemaking in 2016 and hadn’t restarted it at deadline Monday.
Baranwal has suggested that the U.S. could reprocess spent fuel aboard.
