WM Symposia announces WM2025 award winners

The following award winners will be recognized at the Honors & Awards Session at the 51st annual Waste Management Conference, held March 9–13 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona.

John C. Bradburne Jr. has been awarded the WM Distinguished Service Award for 2025, which recognizes a recipient’s leadership in advancing the end-state solutions to major radioactive waste challenges, and whose personal actions have contributed to the achievement of project, technical, or policy resolutions.

Bradburne is a nuclear industry veteran with a career spanning nearly seven decades. His career began in 1955 at Lockheed-Georgia Company, where he become a lead engineer at the Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory. He played a role in the Atoms for Peace program, serving as the senior reactor operator and program director for their reactor exhibits worldwide. Bradburne became the president of Fluor Fernald, working for the Fluor Corporation in 1993. It was through his efforts that the concept and legislation of a “closure contract” was established, which the Fluor Team won, successfully completing the cleanup of the Fernald site. He retired from Fluor in 2001and still serves as a consultant and board member with various firms and continues to shape the management of radioactive waste and the nuclear industry.

Tjalle T. “Chuck” Vandergraaf has been awarded the WM Symposia Program Advisory Committee (PAC) Award for 2025. The PAC Award annually recognizes an individual whose outstanding contributions have helped make and keep the WM Conference the world’s premier conference on the management and disposal of nuclear waste.

Vandergraaf is a nuclear consultant based in Pinawa, Manitoba, Canada. He retired in 2004 from Atomic Energy of Canada after 35 years of research into various aspects of nuclear energy production and into the geological disposal of high-level nuclear waste. He retired once more in 2012, this time from his position as an adjunct professor of earth and environmental science at Providence University College. He is a member of the American Scientific Affiliation, the Canadian Nuclear Society (charter member) and the Canadian Society for Chemistry (fellow).

Alexander W. Abboud is the 2025 WM Young Professional Award recipient. This award recognizes one young professional for their distinguished contributions to the advancement of radioactive waste and radioactive material management. Elevation to the status of “Young Professional” is attained through peer recognition and confirmation by WM Symposia’s board of directors.

Abboud graduated from the University of California–Davis with a chemical engineering degree in 2009 and received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Utah in 2015. He began his career at Idaho National Laboratory in 2015, where he developed computational fluid dynamics (CFD), heat transfer, and chemistry models for various scale melters at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, and thermal and chemical modeling of the dry storage of aluminum-clad spent nuclear fuel in DOE standard canisters. Since 2023, Abboud has been an advanced CFD engineer with Honeywell as part of its Advanced Connected Sustainability Technologies Team.

Jim Braun has been named the 2025 WM/ASME Sarge Ozker Award recipient. Named in honor of M. Sacid (Sarge) Ozker and established in 1980, this award is bestowed for distinguished service and eminent achievement in the commercialization of nuclear power/energy with particular emphasis in the field of radioactive waste management. It is presented by the Nuclear Engineering Division–Radwaste Systems Operating Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

A graduate of Youngstown State University (B.S.) and Lake Erie College (M.B.A.), Braun began his career as a chemical engineer with Cleveland Electric Company in 1985. Most recently, he served as president of Avantech, where he worked from 1999–2023.

James Shuler, a former DOE manager with a career of more than 50 years in radwaste packaging and transportation, was presented the 2025 WM Lifetime Achievement Award. This award was announced in Nuclear Newswire on January 27.

Fellows: The WM Symposia Fellow Award recipients for 2025 include Anthony Banford from the U.K. National Nuclear Laboratory, Frazier Bronson of Mirion Technologies, Paul Jones of Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Andreas Roth of AtkinsRéalis, and Susan Walter of Abel Key Solutions.