President Donald Trump plans to nominate a nuclear physicist from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration’s roughly $2-billion-a-year nonproliferation division, the White House said Thursday.
In a notice posted online, the administration said it intends to nominate Brent Park, who also serves as an ORNL associate laboratory director, as the deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency.
The roughly $2-billion-a-year division oversees NNSA efforts to prevent the spread of special nuclear materials that could help other countries or independent actors obtain a nuclear weapon, or even a non-nuclear “dirty bomb” that could spread radioactive material with conventional explosives.
Defense nuclear nonproliferation also oversees the massive Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at DOE’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The facility, which the Trump administration wants to cancel, is designed to turn 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia.
The White House must next make Park’s nomination official, after which the Senate Armed Services Committee would consider the associate lab director’s fitness for the job in a nomination hearing. If Park passess muster at the committee level, he would advance to the Senate floor for a final vote.
If confirmed, Park would replace David Huizenga as the top official in NNSA defense nuclear nonproliferation. Huizenga was the acting deputy administrator until November, when he had to step down due to federal rules that limit how long interim managers may serve in posts that require Senate confirmation.
Huizenga is still the principal assistant deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation.
