Weapons Complex Monitor Vol. 32 No. 05
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Weapons Complex Monitor
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February 05, 2021

Senate Panel Advances Granholm Nomination for Energy Secretary

By Staff Reports

Jennifer Granholm, President Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Energy, easily cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Wednesday with a 13-4 bipartisan vote, setting her on course for a floor vote that had not been scheduled at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the chair and ranking member, each voted for Granholm, as did Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-N.M.), the latter two of whom have significant nuclear-weapons and nuclear waste sites in their states.

In her confirmation hearing Jan. 28, Granholm, the former Michigan governor, said she would pay special attention to the Department of Energy’s largest nuclear-weapons cleanup, the Hanford Site in Washington state.

Granholm also told Cortez Masto that the Biden administration would not attempt to build a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nev., and that the administration favored the Obama-era concept of consent-based siting: getting approval from local, tribal and state officials before attempting to build a nuclear-waste repository on their territory.

Granholm made only blanket statements about prioritizing the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons mission at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The semi-autonomous Department of Energy branch is under the jurisdiction of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and of its thousands of federal employees, only one, the administrator, reports directly to the Secretary of Energy.

Biden had not nominated anyone at deadline to be either administrator of the NNSA or assistant secretary for environmental management: the top post at the Office of Environmental Management (EM) that helms DOE’s roughly $7.5-billion-a-year cleanup of shuttered Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear-weapons production sites.

It took the Donald Trump administration roughly a year to nominate leaders for NNSA and EM. Trump nominated an NNSA secretary in December 2017 and an assistant secretary for environmental management in January 2018. Like the secretary of energy and the deputy secretary of energy, the NNSA and EM bosses require Senate confirmation.

Biden had also not nominated a deputy secretary of energy at deadline.

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NEW: Via public records request, I’ve been able to confirm reporting today that a warrant has been issued for DOE deputy asst. secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition Sam Brinton for another luggage theft, this time at Las Vegas’s Harry Reid airport. (cc: @EMPublications)

DOE spent fuel lead Brinton accused of second luggage theft.



by @BenjaminSWeiss, confirming today's reports with warrant from Las Vegas Metro PD.

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We have finally begun emplacing defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in Panel 8 of #WIPP.

Read more about the waste emplacement here: https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp_news_20221123-2.asp

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