John Cowles, who at the turn of the century was chief engineer for the nation’s only federally-authorized repository for high-level nuclear-power waste, passed away in his sleep July 22, according to an obituary published in The Boston Globe Thursday. He was 88 years old.
Cowles, who began his nearly 40 years in the energy industry in the 1960s as a chemical and nuclear engineering researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), spent the twilight of his career as chief engineer at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — a position he held until his retirement in 1999.
The Yucca Mountain site, authorized by Congress in 1987 for the purpose of storing spent fuel from the nation’s commercial power plants, has been effectively dead for a decade. The project has been on ice since 2010, when the Barack Obama administration pulled its funding amid political pressure from Nevada’s congressional delegation, most notably the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Prior to his work on Yucca, Cowles worked in the private sector, consulting with the then-new Department of Energy. In 1972, he was appointed to the White House’s national laboratories committee on alternative energy technologies as a representative from LLNL.
Cowles held both a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A memorial gathering was planned for Aug. 28, at St. Anne’s in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Lincoln, Mass.
