The Trump administration on Wednesday announced its intention to nominate a veteran of the nuclear industry as the new assistant secretary to lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
Rita Baranwal’s new job, upon confirmation, would put her in charge of the department’s work on nuclear reactors and nuclear waste – including the so-far unsuccessful effort to revive its license application for the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada.
There was no immediate word regarding when Baranwal would be formally nominated. The White House and Baranwal did not respond to requests for comment by deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor.
Baranwal has since August 2016 served as director of the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) initiative headquartered at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory. The program is intended to promote nuclear power through research and development activities that address cost, safety, security, and other issues that present barriers to the technology. That includes various funding streams – most recently a $20 million technology commercialization fund announced in September.
“To be clear, she’s positively impacted 112 private industry companies in just over two years in her role as GAIN Director,” GAIN said early Thursday from its official Twitter account.
Previously, Baranwal spent almost nine years at Westinghouse Electric in a number of management roles, most recently as director of technology development leading a staff of roughly 80 managers, engineers, and technicians in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her job was to lead “game-changing innovation projects to advance [the] nuclear energy industry” in areas including robotics, advanced manufacturing, and nuclear analysis, according to Baranwal’s LinkedIn profile.
Before joining Westinghouse, Baranwal worked for Bechtel Bettis for two years and nine months at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pa. While there, she headed research and development on nuclear fuel materials for U.S naval reactors, the White House said in its pre-nomination announcement.
Baranwal has a bachelor’s in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in the same field from the University of Michigan.
The nomination would pass through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on its way to a potential confirmation vote by the full Senate. The chamber would have a limited number of legislative days to act on the anticipated nomination prior to the end of the current Congress in early January. Nominations still pending at that point could be returned to the president, who would have to resubmit or drop them. However, the Senate is allowed to hold over some nominations.
The early response from the nuclear world to the pending nomination was positive.
“Happy to hear that @RitaB66 has been nominated for NE-1. She has a history of looking for new approaches to drive nuclear R&D through @GAINnuclear and will work to modernize the office,” Spencer Nelson, a policy associate at the ClearPath Foundation, a conservative organization promoting clean energy, tweeted on Wednesday.
In a statement to RadWaste Monitor, Sam Brinton, legislative affairs director for radioactive waste storage company Deep Isolation, said Baranwal’s background in innovation – highlighted by her work at GAIN – demonstrates she is well suited for the new job. “I’ve been proud to watch Rita develop the next generation of nuclear expertise and ideas and this will be a critical need as we address issues such as the looming nuclear waste challenge.”
The Office of Nuclear Energy, which is funded at over $1.3 billion for the present budget year, is now led by Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Edward McGinnis. Its mission is to provide early stage technology research, development, and demonstration in three areas: sustaining today’s domestic nuclear power fleet; establishing advanced reactor technologies, and maintaining a national strategic fuel cycle and supply chain infrastructure. Much of this work is done at the Idaho National Lab.
When the Obama administration in fiscal 2011 defunded DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, alongside the entire Yucca Mountain project, what remained of its mission fell to the Office of Nuclear Energy.
Congress in 1987 designated the isolated federal property in Nye County, Nev., as the site for an underground disposal space for what is now tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive waste. The legal deadline for DOE to begin taking that spent fuel from nuclear power plants passed more than two decades ago – Jan. 31, 1998.
The Trump administration has sought to revive Yucca Mountain, requesting funding in its first two budgets to reactivate the DOE license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. While the House of Representatives has backed this effort, the Senate has remained opposed and has had its way in the final fiscal 2018 and 2019 budgets for both federal agencies. The administration has not yet said whether it will try again in its fiscal 2020 budget proposal, due in February.
If it does, and if Congress provides the money, the Office of Nuclear Energy would be tasked with seeing the license application through at the NRC. The DOE branch could also be charged with overseeing disposition of spent reactor fuel at proposed centralized commercial storage facilities that, with NRC approval, would operate in Texas and New Mexico until a final disposal site is ready.
Officials in Nevada, who mostly strenuously object to the state becoming home to other states’ nuclear waste, “don’t expect a big fight over the DOE NE pick, but you never know these days,” Bob Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said Thursday by email.
While he did not specifically address Baranwal’s nomination, Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) called on the Trump administration to restore its predecessor’s consent-based approach to radioactive waste disposal. That method — overseen by the Office of Nuclear Energy but never realized when time ran out on the Obama administration in January 2017 — requires approval by local communities and other stakeholders before disposal plans can advance.
“I will not let Nevada be overrun by states that want to move the nuclear waste they created out of their backyards and into ours,” he said to RadWaste Monitor.
Earlier this year, Heller placed a temporary hold on at least one nominee to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as part of his battle against Yucca Mountain. The Senate eventually confirmed the nominees in May.
The last Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for nuclear energy was Pete Lyons, who served from 2011 to 2015. He was succeeded on an acting basis by John Kotek, who was nominated to the job but never got a Senate vote. The nomination was returned to then-President Barack Obama on Jan. 3, 2017, less than three weeks before the end of his administration. Kotek left the Energy Department that month for an executive position with the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade organization for the nuclear industry.
An industry source said earlier in the week the new nominee was picked as early as May of this year, but indicated the actual rollout had been delayed to avoid negotiations with Heller, who is running a tight re-election campaign against Rep. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.).
Heller has reportedly made the case that allowing any pro-Yucca legislation to pass Congress could endanger his seat and the slim 51-49 GOP majority in the Senate. That is seen as a key (though not sole) reason the upper chamber has refused to approve any funding for the project or to consider legislation that would promote federal advancement of the repository. President Donald Trump signed the appropriations bill funding DOE and the NRC on Sept. 21, less than two weeks before the White House announced Baranwal’s coming nomination.
