Funeral services were scheduled for Nov. 9 at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., for a submarine officer who had a second career in the civilian nuclear world as a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staffer for most of the last decade.
Captain John Pasko (Ret.) died Sept. 7, according to a memorial post published Sunday by the local Capital Gazette, which did not list a cause of death. He was 64. Pasko left the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) in 2019 after ten-and-a-half years with the federal government’s independent health and safety watchdog for Department of Energy nuclear-weapon sites.
At DNFSB, Pasko was the lead for safety oversight at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and also held the title of lead for the nuclear materials processing and stabilization group, according to his LinkedIn profile. He started at the board as a senior engineer in 2008.
In 2001, during the final third of an almost 30-year career in the Navy, Pasko received a live-lung transplant from some of his colleagues in the service, according to family photographs shared online by the Department of Defense.
In 1997, a year after its commissioning, Pasko commanded the USS Wyoming, the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine. He graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1979.
