A couple working days after the Senate confirmed his nomination, the Department of Energy still had not sworn in Brent Park as deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Park, a nuclear physicist, will lead a roughly $2-billion-a-year nuclear nonproliferation program that aims to prevent the spread of weaponizable nuclear material while encouraging peaceful atomic programs.
Park comes to National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) headquarters in Washington with nonproliferation chops from nearly eight years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Most recently, he served as associate laboratory director of Oak Ridge’s Global Security Directorate, managing programs focused on nuclear-security and nonproliferation technology development.
President Donald Trump nominated Park on Feb. 13. The Senate confirmed him in a March 23 floor vote.
An NNSA spokesperson on Tuesday declined to comment about the timeline for Park to be sworn into office.
One of the biggest and most controversial components of Park’s realm of responsibility would be a mission to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium under an arms-control pact with Russia that was finalized in 2010 after a decade of negotiations.
The plutonium is slated to be turned into commercial reactor fuel in the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) CB&I AREVA MOX Services is building at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. However, the NNSA has wanted to cancel the program for years and is drawing up the congressionally required paperwork to proceed with its preferred alternative: diluting the plutonium at planned Savannah River facilities, then burying it deep underground in New Mexico.
In his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Park told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) he would, if confirmed, make visiting the MFFF one of his “highest priorities.” Graham favors continuing the project.
While the plutonium mission is in Park’s wheelhouse, MFFF construction is not. That responsibility belongs to Robert Raines: a career civil servant who is the agency’s associate administrator for acquisition and project management. Park’s department would take over MFFF when, or if, the contractor finishes building it.
