The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has rescheduled for next week its confirmation hearing on Jeff Baran’s reappointment to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Baran will now appear before the committee at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Room 406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, alongside four nominees for assistant administrator positions at the Environmental Protection Agency. The hearing had previously been scheduled for Sept. 20.
Baran, a lawyer and former Democratic congressional staffer, is serving his first term on the NRC through June 30, 2018. The White House earlier this month nominated him for a full five-year term, to June 30, 2023.
His reappointment is now advancing just behind the nominations of two new members to fill vacancies on the commission: Annie Caputo, a nuclear engineer and Republican staffer for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and David Wright, an energy consultant and former head of the South Carolina Public Service Commission and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. Both Caputo and Wright are still awaiting Senate floor votes.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade organization for the U.S. nuclear power industry, has selected a Duke Energy executive to become its new chief nuclear officer.
Nuclear navy veteran John W. (Bill) Pitesa, who has spent 37 years with Duke, will join NEI effective Dec. 1 as a “loaned executive,” according to a press release. As CNO, Pitesa will oversee NEI nuclear operations, including spent fuel management and other issues associated with the back end.
“I am thrilled that Bill is joining the NEI team,” NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick said in a Sept. 21 news release.
Pitesa has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Auburn University in Alabama and graduated from Harvard University’s Advanced Management Program. He is a registered professional engineer in North Carolina.
Currently, Pitesa is senior vice president and chief nuclear officer at Duke. He will take over from NEI’s Joe Pollock, who has held the CNO post on a temporary basis since January. Pollock will resume his work as NEI’s vice president of nuclear generation, which he has held since 2013.
NEI’s former senior vice president and CNO, Anthony Pietrangelo, retired in January after 35 years in the nuclear business, including 28 years at NEI and its forerunner organizations.
The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority on Tuesday said 109 low-level radioactive waste “skips” have been removed from storage ponds at the closed Oldbury nuclear power plant in South Gloucester and prepared for storage.
Used fuel elements were placed in the skips after being taken out of Oldbury’s two reactors. The completed skip-extraction process is a “significant step” in the process of decommissioning Oldbury’s cooling ponds, according to a joint press release from the NDA and Oldbury manager Magnox Ltd.
Next steps in the process involve removal of pond furniture and all remaining skips, which are used to hold other parts. That is expected to be completed this year, after which pond water would be drained and surfaces stabilized in 2018.
Oldbury operated from 1967 to 2012, and was the last operational Magnox reactor at the time of its closure. The plant is now being prepared to by 2027 be placed in “care and maintenance” status under which it would be overseen in a “passive state” for several decades to allow radiation levels to drop.
The preparatory effort has included removing all fuel from the plant as of last year.
Magnox as of 2013 expected to spend about £866 million on care and maintenance preparations from 2013 to 2027. The care and maintenance period is projected to last from 2027 to 2096, followed by final site clearance from 2092 to 2101. Total post-closure costs were estimated at over £1.7 billion.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said it helped South Africa on the road to producing a medical isotope using low-enriched uranium instead of weaponizable highly enriched uranium.
The conversion effort wrapped up in August, allowing the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation’s NTP Radioisotopes SOC to produce the medical isotope molybdenum-99 without highly enriched uranium, the NNSA said in a press release Friday.
“South Africa and NTP Radioisotopes have demonstrated outstanding global leadership in completing this lengthy and technically challenging Mo-99 conversion project,” David Huizenga, NNSA’s acting deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said in the release. “NNSA has been extremely pleased to support NTP’s successful efforts to cease HEU-based Mo-99 production while continuing to play a key role in ensuring a reliable global supply of this crucial medical radioisotope.”
Molybdenum-99 is a medical isotope useful for diagnostic imaging: taking pictures of the inside of the human body.
Medical isotopes typically cannot be stockpiled because they decay rapidly, so they must produced constantly from uranium. Historically, most medical isotopes have been derived from highly enriched uranium, which is easier to weaponize than low-enriched uranium.
The NNSA, as part of its roughly $1.8-billion nonproliferation office, helps interested parties produce medical isotopes from less proliferation-sensitive nuclear material, such as low-enriched uranium.
