The Senate on Thursday confirmed two nominations that will return the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to its full five-person membership.
Serving Commissioner David Wright and Senate Appropriations Committee staffer Christopher Hanson were both confirmed en bloc, via voice vote from the Senate floor.
There was no word at deadline Friday regarding the schedule for Wright and Hanson to be sworn in to office. “There are additional administrative actions by the Senate and White House that must take place” first, an NRC spokesman said by email.
Wright has served on the commission since May 2018, with his current term scheduled to expire on June 30 of this year. He took the seat previously held by Commissioner Jeff Baran, who in 2018 received a fresh five-year term through June 2023. He was nominated in January to a standard five-year term, which ends June 30, 2025.
Prior to joining the commission, Wright was an energy and water consultant in South Carolina and had held leadership positions on the South Carolina Public Service Commission and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
After nearly six years at the Department of Energy, Hanson in 2015 became a Democratic staff member for the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee. His issues of focus encompass storage and disposal of spent fuel from nuclear power plants. He was nominated in March to fill a commission position, through June 2024, left vacant by the April 2018 retirement of Commissioner Stephen Burns.
Neither Wright nor Hanson faced resistance from lawmakers during their nomination hearing in March before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Ahead of the vote, the Senate on Thursday discharged the nominations from the committee.
Hanson and Wright will serve alongside NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki and Commissioners Baran and Annie Caputo. No more than three commissioners can represent one political party. Svinicki, Wright, and Caputo are Republicans, while Baran and Hanson are Democrats.
Together, they lead an agency with an annual budget approaching $900 million and nearly 3,000 full-time employees. Its responsibilities include licensing and regulatory oversight of nuclear power reactors and spent-fuel storage installations.
The NRC is currently considering license applications for facilities in New Mexico and Texas that could provide consolidated interim storage of tens of thousands of tons of used fuel now held mostly at power plants around the country.
The agency would also be the adjudicator for the Department of Energy’s 2008 license application to build and operate a radioactive waste repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev. That proceeding has been defunded for a decade. The Trump administration, after failing in three budget cycles to persuade Congress to appropriate money to resume licensing, is focusing on standing up an interim-storage program for the upcoming 2021 federal budget year.
In 2018, Wright wrangled with the state of Nevada over whether he should participate in decisions on the Yucca Mountain license. The state asked Wright to recuse himself from votes, saying his past actions and statements demonstrated a pro-Yucca bias. Wright declined, saying his position was solely in favor of finding a solution to the decades-long impasse over permanent disposition of the nation’s nuclear waste. Nevada then took the matter to federal court, where a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in late 2018 declined to force Wright’s recusal given that he might never have to make a decision on the license application.
