The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will vote Wednesday on whether to give the current Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman five more years at the agency, the committee said Friday.
In a press release, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee said it will consider Christopher Hanson’s renomination as part of a business meeting scheduled at 9:45 a.m. Eastern time at the Senate Dirksen Office Building in Washington.
The vote on Hanson was scheduled for the beginning of the meeting. It follows a courteous but occasionally contentious renomination hearing on April 19, during which Sen. Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.) occasionally grilled Hanson over decision at NRC that she did not agree with.
Capito later told the publication Politico that while she was undecided about how to vote on Hanson, she saw no red flags during the hearing.
Hanson’s term runs through June 29. If he is not reconfirmed, the commission would sink to three members with a 2-1 Republican majority.
The White House renominated Hanson in March. A former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who died last year, Hanson has been chairman of the NRC since January 2021. He joined the commission in June 2020.
Before working as a Senate staffer, Hanson was a policy advisor in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. Before that, he was a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He has master’s degrees from Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, with a focus on ethics and natural resource economics.
