The Senate overwhelmingly approved Mark Menezes as deputy secretary of energy on Tuesday, despite opposition from some nuke-wary Democrats.
The 79-16 vote elevated Menezes to the No. 2 position at the nuclear weapons, waste, and energy agency. Menezes was sworn in to his new job Thursday, after nearly three years as undersecretary of energy.
All but two of the “no” votes were Democrats, including Nevada Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, who are steadfastly opposed to licensing Yucca Mountain or any other site in their state as a nuclear-waste repository, and seldom support any person or policy that does not share the sentiment.
Cortez Masto was the only member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to vote in June against sending Menezes’ nomination to a floor vote. There, she focused her concerns on reports that the Trump administration was considering resuming explosive tests of nuclear weapons. The Nevada Test Site (now called the Nevada National Security Site) was used for atmospheric and underground testing for decades until 1992, when the United States voluntarily suspended those operations.
Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) were the sole Republicans to vote against Menezes’ confirmation. Five senators did not vote.
President Donald Trump in March nominated Menezes as DOE deputy. He succeeds Dan Brouillette, who became secretary of energy last December and has likened his former job to being the department’s chief operating officer.
Menezes had served as undersecretary of energy since November 2017. In that role he was the department’s lead adviser on energy policy and energy technologies. His previous government experience included a three-year stint, from 2003 to 2006, as chief counsel for energy and environment at the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Prior to joining DOE, Menezes worked at Berkshire Hathaway Energy.
Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) comfortably won over half the vote in a Tuesday top-two primary for the congressional district covering the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
Newhouse received 64,259 of 113,081 votes in the 4th Congressional District primary, 56.8% of the total, according to unofficial results from the Washington state Secretary of State. He will face the No. 2 vote getter in the Nov. 3 general election: Democrat Douglas McKinley, who received 30,810 votes, 27.3% of those cast.
The other candidates were Libertarian Ryan Cooper, Republicans Tracy Wright and Sarena Sloot, and Independent Evan Jones.
Newhouse, a former state official and lawmaker, has served in the House since January 2015, succeeding Rep. Doc Hastings in representing nearly 700,000 people in Adams, Benton, Franklin, Grant, Okanogan, and Yakima counties and sections of Douglas and Walla Walla counties.
Like his predecessor, Newhouse has pressed for funding to advance environmental remediation at the Hanford Site, a former plutonium production complex dating to the Manhattan Project in World War II. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he has also criticized the Trump administration’s decision this year not to seek funding to resume licensing of a nuclear waste disposal facility under Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The geologic repository would receive waste from Hanford, along with other federal defense nuclear sites and commercial power reactors. The administration requested funding in three consecutive budget proposals, for fiscal years 2018 to 2020, but was rebuffed each time by Congress. For the upcoming fiscal 2021, it is instead seeking $27.5 million for early stage work at the Department of Energy to develop a program for interim, centralized storage of radioactive waste.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring 5th Congressional District, incumbent Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) is set to face off against Democrat Dave Wilson in the upcoming general election.
Rodgers received 80,382 votes on Tuesday, 51.47% of the 156,162 votes cast, unofficial results show. Wilson took 38,506 votes, 24.7% of the total. Left on the outside were Democrat Chris Armitage, Independent Brendan O’ Regan, and Republican Stephen Major.
McMorris Rodgers spoke on the House floor last week in favor of funding licensing of Yucca Mountain. She and other GOP lawmakers criticized an appropriations measure that later passed the Democrat-led chamber, and which provides the specific amount requested by the White House for the DOE Interim Storage and Nuclear Waste Fund Oversight program.
A longtime executive for U.S. and Canadian power companies is scheduled to join nuclear services firm EnergySolutions in September as chief operating officer.
Jeff Richardson “comes to EnergySolutions with a proven history of safety, operational excellence, vision and success within the Nuclear Industry,” the Salt Lake City-based company said in a brief statement Monday. “Jeff’s industry knowledge and his drive and his focus on safety and customer satisfaction with further support our commitment to growth and development with both our employees and clients.”
Richardson will work out of EnergySolutions’ office in Charlotte, N.C., according to his LinkedIn profile. In 2018, the company centralized its decontamination and decommissioning team in the city.
Richardson joined Canadian utility Ontario Power Generation in June 2018 as senior vice president for nuclear refurbishment execution, overseeing work on the Darlington Nuclear Station. He then became senior vice president for nuclear projects in April 2019, his profile says.
Prior to moving north, Richardson spent 17 years at New Orleans-based power provider Entergy, including nearly a decade as director for major projects-nuclear.
EnergySolutions has over 1,500 employees. Among its operations, it owns low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities in Utah and South Carolina, and has decommissioned nuclear power plants in Illinois and Wisconsin. The company is in the process of acquiring reactor Unit 2 at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, which it would also decommission.
After a brief spike for May, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June returned to the standard practice of spending just a few hundred dollars of its remaining balance from the federal fund intended to pay for a permanent radioactive waste disposal facility.
The NRC outlay from its Nuclear Waste Fund carryover for the month totaled $515 for unspecified program planning and support. That is in line with its spending most every month since early 2019, according to the federal regulator’s reports to Congress.
In May, the NRC applied $282 toward program planning and support, but another $2,577 for knowledge management reports
The June spending left the agency with a $426,710 balance from the fund, of which $5,520 is obligated to pay contracts with the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses.
Congress established the fund in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which directed the Department of Energy to build and operate a geologic repository for tens of thousands of tons of high-level waste from defense nuclear operations and spent fuel from commercial power plants. The legislation was amended in 1987 to designate Yucca Mountain as the location for the disposal site.
The Energy Department filed its license application with the NRC in 2008, but the Obama administration defunded the proceeding two years later. A federal appeals court, though, in August 2013 ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume work on the application.
Since then, the agency has spent over $13.1 million of the more than $13.5 million it had on hand from the Nuclear Waste Fund at the time of the ruling. The top expenses have included nearly $8.4 million to complete a safety evaluation report for the license application and close to $1.6 million for a supplement to the environmental impact statement for Yucca Mountain.
Any additional money from the Nuclear Waste Fund would have to be appropriated by Congress.
Waste Management Symposia (WMS) said Wednesday it has selected industry veteran Susan Walter as managing director, in charge of planning the nonprofit organization’s annual conference in Phoenix.
Walter’s appointment takes effect immediately, according to a press release. She succeeds Jan Carlin, -who stepped down in May after more than two-and-a-half years in the position.
“We are delighted to have a Managing Director with the talents, experience, and drive that Susan possesses,” WMS Chairman Jim Gallagher said in the release. “Also, I want to thank Bob Weiler who has served very well as the interim Managing Director since May.”
Walter worked for nearly 22 years at AECOM in various roles, including principal scientist and Department of Energy account leader.
She founded Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Abel Key Solutions in 2017, according to her LinkedIn profile. As CEO, Walter “provides business management, business development and proposal services to clients seeking to do business with the federal government – with a primary focus on the nuclear industries (DOE, NNSA, Office of Science).”
From 2018 to this year, Walter was also deputy chair for the Waste Management Symposia Program Advisory Committee, supporting development of the technical program for the conference.
Every March, the event attracts over 2,000 participants from around the world for expert discussions of radioactive waste management and related topics, including cleanup of U.S. defense nuclear sites. Attendance in 2020 dropped by about 10%, to roughly 2,100, as novel coronavirus 2019 spread across the nation. The conference was one of the last large-scale events held most anywhere during the pandemic.
The organization hopes for a live event in 2021, “but we are also determining how best to do a virtual conference if needed,” WMS President Jim Fiore said by email Thursday. “The well being of the attendees and our staff remains our number one priority.”
From The Wires
From The Associated Press: FBI affidavit offers clues regarding organizations suspected of involvement in alleged $60 million bribery and money laundering scheme to prevent closure of two nuclear power plants in Ohio.
From The Orange County Register: All used fuel has been taken out of cooling pools at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County, Calif.
From Crain’s Chicago Business: Exelon eyes decisions on potential closures of Illinois nuclear power plants.
From The Hill: Nuclear Regulatory Commission briefly limited access to office in Pennsylvania for cleaning after a contractor employee tested positive for COVID-19.
From the Sentinel-Tribune: Milestone 5,000th truck shipment of contaminated material from the Luckey Site in Ohio, a cleanup project under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP).
