The Trump administration’s nominee for assistant secretary of energy for environmental management, Anne Marie White, is taking private one-on-one meetings with senators prior to an expected hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, an industry source said Thursday.
“She started her Senate rounds this week,” said the source, who said he did not know how many senators White has met with so far. Such individual meetings are common for nominees to positions requiring Senate confirmation.
White, a nuclear energy consultant, founded Bastet Technical Services LLC and has worked for decades in the cleanup sector.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted in favor of confirmation on Jan. 30, but there is no word on when White might get a floor vote on taking over the $6.5 billion annual program for cleanup of Department of Energy nuclear sites. Congress is not in session next week.
A separate source, a longtime observer of nuclear policy issues, said last week he expected the confirmation process might not end until late spring or early summer.
The Senate Armed Services Committee, which also has jurisdiction on White’s nomination, has not scheduled a confirmation hearing to date. A staffer said Thursday the committee was looking at March 1, although the date is not definite yet.
The Senate on Thursday confirmed Melissa Burnison by voice vote for the position of assistant secretary of energy for congressional and intergovernmental affairs. Burnison, previously with the Nuclear Energy Institute industry group, passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee confirmation process alongside White.
Barrasso Continues to Withhold Support
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) placed a hold on White’s nomination in January over the Energy Department’s practice of bartering excess uranium to help fund cleanup at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio.
In a Wall Street Journal commentary last week, the Wyoming Republican said DOE trading away government uranium to contractors is one reason domestic production of uranium is “at the lowest levels since the early 1950s.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry “took a good first step” in May 2017 when he cut the amount of uranium bartered to contractors from 1,600 metric tons to 1,200 metric tons, Barrasso wrote. DOE barters uranium to contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth to help pay for cleanup of the 1950s-era uranium enrichment plant. Portsmouth is the only DOE facility getting part of its cleanup money from uranium barter.
During the Jan. 30 Senate Energy and Natural Resources business meeting on the nomination, Barrasso said White has not pledged to end the barter practice if she becomes assistant secretary.
The industry source suggested Barrasso is misdirecting his frustration over uranium barter toward White: “She didn’t create the problem.”
A Barrasso spokesperson could not immediately be reached Thursday. It was not known if has is among the senators with whom White has met.
Uranium barter language is retained in the Trump administration’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal for DOE, which was released Monday. “The Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act of 2006 provided the Department of Energy authority to barter, transfer, or sell uranium and to use any proceeds, without fiscal year limitation, to remediate contaminated uranium inventories held by the Secretary of Energy,” according to the budget request.
