A day after an all-hands meeting at NRC headquarters, which largely focused on remote work, Dan Dorman, the agency’s executive director for operations and chief steward of its latest remote work rules, faced questions from a House committee about post-pandemic telework policies.
Congress this year has grilled the NRC about reported dips in employee morale. Some nuclear-energy boosters on Capitol Hill fear that anything other than a tip-top NRC workforce could jeopardize the surge of interest in nuclear power, as worries about the availability, provenance and climate-friendliness of energy intersect.
This spring, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is not seeking reelection next year, took Hanson to task for falling job satisfaction at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Susan Khoury, a former special agent in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of the Inspector General, is running for sheriff in Miami-Dade County next year, the online publication Florida Politics reported this week. Khoury is running as a Democrat and already has two primary challengers, the outlet reported.
Khoury joined the NRC in 1997, according to a court filing from a federal discrimination suit she brought against the agency, and retired from federal service in 2004, according to Florida Politics. She entered electoral politics after winning a lawsuit in 2022 stemming from a 2015 incident in which a law-enforcement officer wrestled her to the ground and involuntarily committed her to a mental institution after she collected images and videos of people illegally parking in her neighborhood.
Next year’s Miami-Dade sheriff election will be unusual. It will be the first since 1966, owing to an amendment to Florida’s state constitution. Also, one Democratic candidate in the election apparently attempted suicide in July following a domestic dispute in a hotel, CBS News Miami reported.
The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has seen its remediation responsibility expand in recent times, the agency said in an annual report filed with the House of Commons on Sept. 19.
“We have been asked to use our specialist expertise and skills, to decommission newer reactors as they reach the end of their power-generating lives,” according to the report. “Arrangements have been agreed by the UK Government, Scottish Government and EDF Energy for the NDA [Nuclear Decommissioning Authority] group to decommission Britain’s seven advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) stations” as the units are retired over the next decade.
After defueling, the spent fuel from the units will be shipped to Sellafield for interim storage, according to the report. Overall the authority, which has 17,000 workers, is responsible for decommissioning 17 nuclear sites, tearing down from than 800 buildings and cleaning up 950 hectares, which translates to more than 2,300 acres of land.
