Kathryn Huff officially became the head of the Department of Energy’s nuclear energy office this week following her strongly bipartisan confirmation last week by the Senate.
Huff, confirmed in a landslide May 5, was sworn in by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm as DOE’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, or NE-1, according to a Wednesday Tweet from the Office of Nuclear Energy.
IT’S OFFICIAL! 🙌 Dr. Kathryn Huff is the new Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy. 👏 👏 👏 pic.twitter.com/HEtNoVLKyb
— Office of Nuclear Energy (@GovNuclear) May 11, 2022
As NE-1, Huff’s is now in charge of a DOE office tasked with, among other responsibilities, finding a solution for the more than 80,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel stranded at civilian nuclear power reactors across the country. The agency is already hammering out details for how it will go about canvassing willing host sites for a federal interim storage facility — a task made more difficult by the lack of a permanent repository for nuclear waste.
A former nuclear science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Huff joined the Biden administration in May 2021, spending nine months or so in the Office of Nuclear Energy’s number two spot, as well as acting NE-1. She then became a political appointee in Granholm’s office; a senior advisor to the secretary.
In February, an anonymous DOE employee alleged that Huff had engaged in prohibited hiring practices during the nuclear energy office’s search for a deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition. The Office of Personnel Management, the agency to which the complaint was sent, did not acknowledge whether it had received such allegations, or whether it was investigating them.
