Sam Brinton is the Department of Energy’s new deputy assistant secretary for spent nuclear fuel and waste disposition, according to an internal DOE email seen by the Exchange Monitor.
It is Brinton’s first government job. In the role, Brinton will take the helm of DOE’s frustrated, decades-long effort to find a home for more than 80,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel currently kept at the power plants that generated it. Brinton was publicly listed as the deputy assistant secretary on June 19, according to a DOE organization chart.
The Barack Obama administration in 2010 halted the licensing of the congressionally authorized Yucca Mountain, which was supposed to be a dual-purpose, deep geologic repository for civilian and defense waste.
It took decades before that for Congress to authorize Yucca for that purpose, and in the decade-plus that has passed since, DOE has made little progress with its legal obligation to take title to the spent fuel from power plant owners and dispose of it permanently.
Stepping into the vacuum of federal inaction, two companies have stepped and asked for Nuclear Regulatory commission licenses to build privately operated interim spent fuel depots — something DOE is barred by law from doing until it builds a permanent repository.
This gridlock is now the 34 year-old Brinton’s to untangle.
Brinton, who identifies as gender fluid and uses “they,” “them” and “their” as singular, third-person pronouns, comes to DOE after five years of running government relations programs at Deep Isolation, a startup nuclear waste company experimenting with deep-underground borehole disposal for spent fuel.
In June, Kathryn Huff, DOE’s assistant secretary of energy for nuclear energy, affirmed her plans to hire Brinton to run the department’s spent fuel programs. Huff wanted to bring Brinton into DOE over the winter, but the agency put the hiring on ice after an anonymous DOE employee complained of irregularities in Huff’s hiring process.
Brinton has a dual master of science in nuclear engineering technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote their masters thesis about used nuclear fuel storage. Brinton has two bachelor’s degrees from Kansas State University: one in mechanical engineering with a nuclear engineering option and another in vocal music performance.
