Biden appoints six new NWTRB members
President Biden has announced the appointment of six new members to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency that evaluates the technical and scientific validity of the Department of Energy’s activities related to managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
Joining the NWTRB are Peter Swift, Richelle Allen-King, Lake Barrett, Miles Greiner, Silvia Jurisson, and Seth Tuler.
Board members serve part time and are appointed by the president from a list of nominees submitted by the National Academy of Sciences. According to the NWTRB, nominees are eminent in a field of science or engineering, including environmental sciences, and are selected solely on the basis of established records of distinguished service. The appointments were announced by the White House on September 27.
Swift
Peter Swift, who is the designated chair of the NWTRB, is a consulting geoscientist with over 30 years of experience in HLW management and disposal. He was formerly a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, where he served from 2011 to 2020 as the national technical director of the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy Spent Fuel and Waste Technology Research and Development Campaign. His prior experience includes key roles in the certification and licensing processes for both the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the formerly proposed Yucca Mountain repository.
Swift received a Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Arizona, master’s and bachelor’s degrees in geology from the University of Wyoming, and a B.A. in English from Yale University. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, and a member or past member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and the Geochemical Society.
Allen-King
Richelle Allen-King, professor of geological sciences at the University at Buffalo–State University of New York, is a hydrogeochemist with more than 35 years of experience studying the fate and transport of contaminants in groundwater with particular focus on the importance of geologic context. She is also interested in groundwater impacts on lake geochemistry in a changing climate.
Allen-King earned a Ph.D. in earth sciences from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and a B.A. in chemistry with specialization in earth sciences from the University of California–San Diego. She has served as a member of the National Research Council’s Water Science and Technology Board and on several of the council’s technical committees on groundwater use, contamination, and remediation. Allen-King has also served on committees and advisory panels for the Environmental Protection Agency. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Barrett
Lake Barrett is an independent consultant in the energy field. He has worked in the nuclear energy and nuclear materials management areas for more than five decades and currently serves as special advisor to Japan for the recovery of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Before that, Barrett served as the head of the DOE’s Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste Management, which was responsible for implementing programs for SNF and HLW management, as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. He also served at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in various senior capacities, including as the site director during the stabilization, recovery, and cleanup of the Three Mile Island reactor accident. He has degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering, has been the recipient of various executive branch and congressional honors, and is a member emeritus of ANS.
Greiner
Miles Greiner, a foundation professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Nevada–Reno (UNR), is an ANS member, a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and past chair of the UNR Mechanical Engineering Department. Since 1993 he has directed the UNR Nuclear Packaging Program, which conducts externally funded research to develop and experimentally validate computational methods to predict the thermal performance of nuclear packaging under normal and severe fire accident conditions. This includes performing large-scale experiments and computational studies of heat transfer to massive objects engulfed in pool fires, developing methods to predict transport during used nuclear fuel package vacuum drying, and developing wireless methods to monitor nuclear packaging internal conditions.
Greiner earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jurisson
Silvia Jurisson is professor emerita of chemistry and radiology at the University of Missouri. She has been involved in inorganic and radiochemistry research with applications to radioisotope production and separations, radiopharmaceutical chemistry, radio-environmental chemistry, and biological systems, and has trained many graduate, undergraduate, and postdoctoral students over the past 30 years. She is an associate editor of Radiochimica Acta and a councilor for the Nuclear Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the ACS, and the Society of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences. Jurisson earned her Ph.D. in inorganic and radiopharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Cincinnati and her B.S. in chemistry from the University of Delaware.
Tuler
Seth Tuler is an associate professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies Division at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and a senior research fellow at the Social and Environmental Research Institute. His research interests focus on risk governance, public participation in risk assessment and decision-making, and developing tools to characterize human impacts and vulnerabilities to risk events. He has extensive experience with interdisciplinary research in multiple policy arenas, including climate adaptation planning, oil spill response planning, nuclear waste management, and regional land-use planning.
Tuler served on the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Transportation of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste and was asked to coauthor two technical reports for President Barack Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
