Tim Walsh, a combat veteran and real estate developer, was officially sworn in by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright Thursday to lead the Department of Energy’s roughly $8-billion-dollar nuclear cleanup program.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management shared the news via a LinkedIn post with Walsh alongside Wright. The caption says “he is finally here.”
The move formally makes Walsh the head of North America’s largest nuclear cleanup program.
The cleanup office wasted little time in updating its organizational chart to show Walsh as the new assistant secretary of Environmental Management, or EM-1. The chart shows that former acting EM-1 Joel Bradburne, a longtime DOE hand who led the Portsmouth and Paducah Site cleanups, now drops down to acting EM-2.
As for Walsh, he was part of a big bloc of Donald Trump administration nominees approved by the Senate 51-to-47 early this month. He becomes the first Senate-confirmed head of Environmental Management since March 2018 when Anne Marie White was confirmed during the first Trump administration.
Walsh’s confirmation was not drama-free. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) at one point placed a hold on the nomination while seeking assurances Wright and Walsh would remain committed to opening the Waste Treatment Plant at the Hanford Site at Richland, Wash.
But DOE issued its final critical decision for operations and the mammoth plant started converting low-level liquid radioactive tank waste into a solid glass form days prior to the Oct. 15 legal deadline.
Walsh was first nominated by the Trump White House in March. While Walsh was something of an unknown quantity initially in the nuclear weapons complex, he was cleared out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in July.
Walsh told the panel that while living in Colorado the Rocky Flats nuclear facility cleanup helped him grasp the importance of the nuclear remediation mission. Walsh because a successful businessman in Colorado. He founded Confluence Companies, a real estate development company in Golden, Co.
Walsh is also a former company commander with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. He studied engineering at West Point and eventually earned a master’s degree from Stanford.