Joyce Connery, chair of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and longtime fed, is retiring from government service at the end of January.
“As you have heard, my plan is to retire at the end of the month,” Connery said late Friday in an electronic message to Exchange Monitor. Connery told the staff last week.
The expectation around the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) is that vice chair Thomas Summers, nominated and confirmed as a board member in 2020 during the first Donald Trump administration, will be elevated to chair. Connery expects that to occur soon, now that Donald Trump (R) was inaugurated as president for a second term.
Connery’s departure is not a shock. In addition to being a Democratic appointee to DNFSB, her term actually ended in October. Connery initially planned to stick around to allow the board, set up as a five-member panel, keep its quorum.
Connery has 20 years of federal experience concentrated in nuclear safety, security and nonproliferation, according to her online bio. First picked for the board by President Barack Obama in 2015, Conery was made the chair by President Joe Biden in January 2021.
“We did not get Ike in during the last Congress, sadly,” Connery said Friday, alluding to William (Ike) White, former longtime acting head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. The last session of congress ended without the Senate voting to confirm White to DNFSB, the small agency charged by Congress with providing independent nuclear safety advice and analysis to the secretary of energy. Joe Biden White nominated White to the board last May.
The Senate’s failure to confirm White, coupled with Connery’s departure, will leave DNFSB with only two members . In addition to Summers, a retired Air Force colonel and former National Nuclear Security Administration policy adviser, the other is Biden appointee Patricia Lee, a longtime executive at DOE’s Savannah River National Laboratory.
