Miller to run nuclear division at DoE

Signaling the importance of resolving the nuclear waste issue to the future of nuclear energy, President Obama has nominated a single individual to perform both functions at the Department of Energy. Warren “Pete” Miller, a long-time senior official at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was named by Obama to become assistant secretary for nuclear energy , and director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management .

Both appointments require Senate confirmation. OCRWM has managed the long-stalled DOE effort to build a repository for spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada . But the Obama administration intends to scrap the controversial project and look at other options for dealing with the waste from the country’s 104 operating commercial reactors, as well as the high-level radioactive wastes that were generated by DOE’s nuclear weapons production.

The various options are to be reviewed by a blue-ribbon committee whose members have yet to be named. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said there is plenty of time to figure out a new course of action, and he has indicated that the administration is open to reprocessing spent fuel, provided that a new technology can be developed that does not produce separated plutonium, as do the processes used by Japan and France. Miller, who retired from LANL in 2001, has most recently been a part-time professor at Texas A&M University.