The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has selected Maria Mitchell-Williams as the next deputy manager of the Idaho Cleanup Project at Idaho National Laboratory.
Mitchell-Williams fills the vacancy created when Mark Brown became manager of the cleanup project in March, a DOE spokesperson said in an emailed statement Tuesday to Exchange Monitor.
Mitchell-Williams, who previously served as assistant manager of business and acquisition management for the Idaho Cleanup Project, brings 20 years of experience in contract management and budget formulation to her new role, DOE said.Brown moved into the top cleanup job at Idaho after manager Connie Flohr announced plans to leave the government and take a post with Navarro.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, last week easily won re-election to another term representing Washington’s 9th congressional district.
According to results from the Washington secretary of state’s office, Smith won nearly 66% of the vote to defeat a challenge by a fellow Democrat, Melissa Chaudhry.
In a 37-page framework for meeting its commitment to triple U.S. nuclear energy generation by 2050, the White House on Tuesday devoted about one page to disposal of spent nuclear fuel.
The framework was a sort of deliverable that followed the U.S.’ 2023 pledge at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference. Twenty four other countries also pledged to triple nuclear generation at the meeting.
In the White House’s framework, the lame-duck administration of President Joe Biden (D) wrote that there remains “broad international scientific consensus that consent-based siting of a deep geologic repository is the safest and most secure method for spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive waste disposal,” and that the U.S.’ “[g]eneric repository standards would also need to be updated to support the use of a deep geologic repository.” Current U.S. standards for deep geologic repositories are all tailored to the moribund Yucca Mountain project, which has become politically toxic to both of the major political parties.
