President Donald Trump has chosen Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Kristine Svinicki to replace Stephen Burns as NRC chairman, an official with the agency said Thursday, confirming the first significant decision from Trump concerning the agency.
Svinicki, a Republican who disagreed with discontinuing Yucca Mountain licensing proceedings in 2010, started her second five-year term in 2012. A longtime nuclear engineer and policy adviser at the state and federal levels and in the legislative and executive branches, Svinicki worked in the Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, the entity charged with carrying out activities tied to DOE’s Nuclear Waste Policy Act obligations, which was broken up in the Yucca Mountain cancellation. She spent more than a decade as a Senate staff member, serving Sens. John Warner (R-Va.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). There had been speculation that Svinicki would fill a political appointee position under Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry.
Burns, an Obama appointee, was sworn into the commission in 2014 to a term ending in June 2019. Commissioner Jeff Baran and two vacant seats round out the five-member board.
The Obama administration nominated Democrat Jessie Hill Roberson, vice chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, to fill the first vacancy, and she awaits Senate confirmation. The second seat opened this past summer, when Commissioner William Ostendorff stepped down to take a teaching position at the U.S. Naval Academy.
