Thomas Ashley will take over as the permanent director of the office of investigations at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on July 30, the agency announced this week.
Ashley had been the acting director of the office since February, when Tracy Higgs, the previous director, retired. The offices of investigations investigates allegations of wrongdoing by NRC licensees and their contractors but not NRC employees or agency contractors.
Tritiated water reached the edge of the Mississippi River near the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, Xcel Energy said last week.
The company said it did not detect tritiated water in the river itself, local media reported. Tritiated water leaked from the plant from a series of burst pipes, discovered in November and March. In April, Xcel briefly shut down the plant, located about 50 miles from the river, to fix the leaks.
The head of Germany’s federal nuclear waste office said the European nation should select a site for a permanent nuclear waste repository by 2046, according to a German-language report.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Federal Office of the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management planned to host its second annual Repository Search Forum on Nov. 17-18 in Halle, Germany, some 100 miles southwest by road from Berlin at the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, according to the office’s English-language website.
