President-elect Joe Biden will announce his Secretary of Energy soon, according to his newly appointed chief of staff Ron Klain.
Likely contenders include people who served in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, including former secretary Ernest Moniz, Arun Majumdar and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall. Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee is another rumoredly potential pick.
Of all the candidates, Moniz is the most vocal supporter of alternative solutions to Yucca Mountain, which is unlikely to go anywhere under a Biden administration. The president-elect has already spoken in opposition to the storage facility, in February said that “under a Biden Administration there would be absolutely zero dumping of nuclear waste in Nevada.”
Moniz has made a number of public statements in support of consolidated interim waste storage, calling it essential in 2016. A nuclear physicist by training, Moniz served on Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future between 2010 and 2012, where he helped draft alternative plans to Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste disposal in the United States. Those alternatives involved a separate geologic repository for nuclear-weapons waste, plus consolidated interim storage for power-plant waste under what DOE called a “consent-based” siting model.
Moniz in 2016 called on Congress to support legislation allowing for the construction of consolidated interim storage facilities. He told lawmakers that if the legislature gave the Department of Energy the authority, DOE could get an interim storage pilot running “in not much more than five years.”
After Moniz left the cabinet, ahead of the incoming Trump administration in 2017, he became co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit working on nuclear-weapons nonproliferation.
Of the other nominees, Majumdar has called the waste storage situation in the United States an “urgent” problem — an old characterization he offered in a Senate hearing early in the Obama administration — while Sherwood-Randall and Inslee have been mum on the issue, more or less.
Sherwood-Randall served as Deputy Secretary of Energy from 2014 to 2017. In her 2014 nomination hearing to be the DOE No. 2, she avoided making waves about spent-fuel storage. Of the possible nominees, she has perhaps the strongest nuclear-weapons background. Before her last stint at DOE, she was special assistant to the President and White House coordinator for defense policy, countering weapons of mass destruction, and arms control.
Inslee, who ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, spoke in opposition to Yucca Mountain in 2019, joining a group of other Democrats in dismissing the potential storage facility. At a talk at Illinois Tech in October, longtime Yucca Mountain supporter U.S. Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said Inslee once supported plans for the permanent waste repository but changed his position because of political pressure.