The full Senate Tuesday voted 54-to-41, mostly upon party lines, to confirm the nomination of Patricia Lee, a manager at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, to be a member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
The final vote was tallied shortly after 3:00 p.m. Eastern time.
The Senate resumed consideration of the Lee nomination Tuesday. There was unanimous consent agreement Monday to get Lee’s nomination to this point.
The White House sent Lee’s nomination to the Senate Armed Services Committee one year ago. Her nomination wasreported favorably out of the committee in October 2023.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is a small agency charged with providing independent safety advice and recommendations on nuclear defense facilities to the secretary of energy. The five-member DNFSB is down to two people, Chair Joyce Connery, whose term ends in October, and vice chair Thomas Summers.
The Biden administration in May nominated William (Ike) White, who led DOE’s nuclear cleanup branch for five years, to fill one of the vacancies on the DNFSB.
Lee has spent more than three decades working at Savannah River National Laboratory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to DNFSB. Lee has served on a variety of technical, non-technical, and community affiliated boards, and she holds a Ph.D in Nuclear Engineering/Health Physics and M.S. in Health Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
