The White House last week nominated incumbent chairman Christopher Hansen to serve another term as a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
If confirmed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which had not scheduled a hearing on the renomination at deadline, Hanson would remain at the NRC through June 29, 2029.
Hanson’s current term expires June 29. He was appointed chair of the commission only five days after President Joe Biden’s (D) inauguration, about eight months after he was confirmed in May 2020 during in the final months of President Donald Trump’s (R) first term.
Hanson is serving out the remainder of the term of Stephen Burns, who resigned in April 2019.
Prior to the commission, Hanson spent five years as Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) staffer on the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee. Feinstein, who chaired the committee, died in September.
Before his stint as a Senate staffer, Hanson was a policy advisor in the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. Before that, he was a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He has master’s degrees from Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, with a focus on ethics and natural resource economics.
If the Senate, in an election year, does not approve Hanson’s reappointment, the NRC, already lacking its full complement of five members, would drop to three members: two Republicans and a Democrat.
