Corey Hinderstein, the Joe Biden administration’s nominee to run the National Nuclear Security Administration’s defense nuclear nonproliferation office, cleared the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by a voice vote.
The full Senate had not scheduled a confirmation vote for Hinderstein at deadline Friday. If confirmed, she would lead a roughly $2-billion-a-year portfolio that includes international and domestic programs to halt the spread of fissile material and nuclear weapons technology, plus construction of facilities to deweaponize many metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium.
In her confirmation hearing, Hinderstein fielded some pointed questions about her stance on Iran’s nuclear program, but her old remarks on cable news about Tehran’s uranium enrichment activities ultimately did not imperil her nomination.
Ronald Dailey was appointed president of BWX Technologies subsidiary Nuclear Fuel Services, Erwinn, Tenn. He’ll now be in charge of the company that fabricates uranium fuel rods for the Navy and purifies uranium for use in nuclear-weapon secondary stages manufactured at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Daily was most recently deputy general manager for BWXT’s Syncom Space Services (S3) at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where he worked on the Space Launch System heavy-lift crew rocket, primed by Boeing.
Intel Corp. won’t lead any more bids for supercomputing prime contracts, the specialist publication Next Platform reported this week.
The vaunted chip maker has supplied hardware across the Department of Energy complex, including at the nuclear weapons laboratories.
Tammy Ma, Xueqiao Xu and Tilo Doeppner of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory all were recognized as 2021 fellows of the American Physical Society (APS), the nuclear-weapons design laboratory announced Tuesday.
Ma and Doeppner each work in the lab’s National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Directorate. Xu works in the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate.
Bill Daughton, Andrew Gaunt and Cristiano Nisoli each won Los Alamos National Laboratory fellows prizes for research while Eva Birnbaum took home a fellows prize for leadership, the lab announced in a press release.
Daughton is with the Laboratory’s Primary Physics group, where he works on inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research: a discipline whose application helps maintain the nuclear-weapons stockpile. Gaunt works in molecular transuranic chemistry at the lab’s Inorganic, Isotope and Actinide Chemistry group. Nisoli works in the lab’s Physics and Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group, researching magnetism and novel magnetic materials. Birnbaum is Los Alamos’ isotope program manager.
While the U.K.’s top uniformed officer visited the U.S., the commander of U.S. Strategic Command visited London this week.
While Gen. Sir Nicholas Carter, the U.K. chief of the defence staff, spoke with a Washington think-tank about the AUKUS nuclear-submarine partnership, Adm. Charles Richard, head of the intra-service strategic command and its nuclear forces, called on the Ministry of Defence.
