Neile Miller, former principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), has joined Nevada National Security Site operating contractor Mission Support and Test Services as head of government affairs, the company announced Monday.
Miller was No. 2 at the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency from August 2010 through June 2013, according to her LinkedIn profile.
According to the same LinkedIn profile, Miller has been working for Mission Support and Test Services (MSTS) since August 2018. A spokesperson for the Honeywell-led contractor did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Mission Support and Test Services also includes Jacobs Engineering and Huntington Ingalls Industries. The company’s contract, awarded in 2017, is worth roughly $5 billion over 10 years, with options.
Miller will run MSTS government affairs from Washington, D.C., responsible for presenting the company’s interests to Congress and DOE. She joins the Nevada site contractor as it begins work on expanding the U1a underground complex that supports subcritical plutonium experiments, and as the former Nevada Test Site plays host through 2026 to 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium shipped to the site over the state’s protests.
Subcritical plutonium experiments help the NNSA gauge, without resorting to nuclear explosive tests, whether nuclear weapons retain their destructive power as they age. The 500 kilograms of weapon-usable plutonium was shipped to Nevada to comply with a court order in a lawsuit filed by South Carolina. The material, once to be disposed of permanently, will be used at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to make the fissile cores of future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads.
