WASHINGTON – Today, President Biden announced his intent to appoint the following individuals as members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board:
- Peter Swift, Member and Designated Chair
- Richelle Allen, Member
- Lake Barrett, Member
- Miles Greiner, Member
- Silvia Jurisson, Member
- Seth Tuler, Member
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board
The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) is an independent federal agency in the executive branch of the U.S. Federal Government. NWTRB’s purpose is to perform independent technical and scientific peer review of the U.S. Department of Energy’s activities related to managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel. NWTRB reports its findings and recommendations to Congress and the Secretary of Energy.
Peter Swift, Member and Designated Chair
Peter Swift is a consulting geoscientist with over 30 years of experience in high-level radioactive waste management and disposal. He was formerly a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he served from 2011 to 2020 as the National Technical Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy Spent Fuel and Waste Technology Research and Development Campaign. His prior experience includes key roles in the certification and licensing processes for both the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the formerly proposed Yucca Mountain repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in Nevada. Specific to the Yucca Mountain project, he led the total system performance assessment effort that developed estimates of the long-term safety of the site and then served as the Chief Scientist for the program’s Lead Laboratory during the Department of Energy’s 2008 submittal of the license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Swift received a PhD in Geosciences from the University of Arizona, Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Geology from the University of Wyoming, and a B.A. in English from Yale University. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, and a member or past member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and the Geochemical Society.
Richelle Allen, Member
Richelle M. Allen-King is Professor of Geological Sciences at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is a hydrogeochemist with more than 35 years of experience studying the fate and transport of contaminants in groundwater with particular focus on the importance of geologic context. She is also interested in groundwater impacts on lake geochemistry in a changing climate.
Allen-King earned a B.A in Chemistry with Specialization in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego and PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Waterloo. She has served as a member of the National Research Council’s Water Science and Technology Board and on several of the Council’s technical committees on groundwater use, contamination, and remediation. Particularly relevant were the NRC committee on Development and Implementation of a Cleanup Technology Roadmap, NRC Committee on the Bioavailability of Contaminants in Soils and Sediments, and the Committee on Innovations in Ground Water and Soil Clean-up. Allen-King has also served on committees and advisory panels for the Environmental Protection Agency, such as Ecological Processes and Effects Committee.
Allen-King resides in Buffalo, New York. She was selected as a Henry Darcy Distinguished Lecturer, sponsored by the National Ground Water Association, and is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Lake Barrett, Member
Lake Barrett is an independent consultant in the energy field. He has worked in the nuclear energy and nuclear materials management areas for more than five decades. Barrett currently serves as special advisor to Japan for the recovery of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Before that, he served as the head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Nuclear Waste Management which was responsible for implementing programs for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste management, as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In that capacity, Barrett led the complex scientific Yucca Mountain Geologic Repository program through the statutory site selection process culminating with the presidential site designation and following successful House and Senate votes before he retired from federal service.
He also served at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in various senior capacities, including as the site director during the stabilization, recovery, and cleanup of the Three Mile Island reactor accident. He has testified in various congressional hearings concerning spent nuclear fuel policies and the Fukushima reactor accident. He also has extensive managerial and engineering experience in Department of Energy’s Defense Programs and private industry at both Bechtel Power Corporation, with commercial nuclear power plants, and Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics, with nuclear reactor and submarine systems design, operation, and decommissioning. He has degrees in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering and has been the recipient of various executive branch and congressional honors.
Miles Greiner, Member
Miles Greiner is currently a Foundation Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and past chair of the UNR Mechanical Engineering Department. Since 1993 he has directed of the UNR Nuclear Packaging Program, which conducts externally funded research to develop and experimentally validate computational methods to predict the thermal performance of nuclear packaging under normal and severe fire accident conditions. This includes performing large-scale experiments and computational studies of heat transfer to massive objects engulfed in pool fires, developing methods to predict transport during used nuclear fuel package vacuum drying, and developing wireless methods to monitor nuclear packaging internal conditions.
Since 2016, Greiner has directed a UNR educational program which awards graduate certificates in nuclear packaging and in transportation security and safeguards. He has published over one-hundred journal articles and conference papers on nuclear packaging topics. Miles Greiner earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Silvia Jurisson, Member
Silvia Jurisson is Professor Emerita of Chemistry and Radiology at the University of Missouri. She has been involved in inorganic and radiochemistry research with applications to radioisotope production and separations, radiopharmaceutical chemistry, radio-environmental chemistry, and biological systems, and has trained many graduate, undergraduate, and postdoctoral students over the past 30 years. She has over 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals. She is an Associate Editor of Radiochimica Acta, and a Councilor for the Nuclear Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
She received the John H. Hubbell Award from Elsevier in 2018, the TERACHEM Award in 2018, and the Glenn T. Seaborg Award for Nuclear Chemistry from the ACS in 2012. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2014, a Fellow of the ACS in 2016, and a Fellow of the Society of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences in 2022.
She spent 5 years in the pharmaceutical industry at Squibb/Bristol-Myers-Squibb before beginning her academic career at the University of Missouri. She earned her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Delaware, and her PhD in inorganic and radiopharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Cincinnati.
Seth Tuler, Member
Seth Tuler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies Division, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the Social and Environmental Research Institute. Tuler’s research interests focus on risk governance, public participation in risk assessment and decision making, and developing tools to characterize human impacts and vulnerabilities to risk events. He has extensive experience with interdisciplinary research in multiple policy arenas, including climate adaptation planning, oil spill response planning, nuclear waste management, and regional land-use planning.
Tuler was a member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Energy-Related Epidemiologic Research and chaired its Subcommittee for Community Affairs for 2 years. He served on the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Transportation of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste and was asked to co-author two technical reports for President Barack Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future on social distrust, with Roger Kasperson, and public engagement, with Eugene Rosa and Thomas Webler. More recently he served on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Alternatives for the Demilitarization of Conventional Munitions; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Standing Committee on Chemical Demilitarization; and National Research Council Committee on Review of Criteria for Successful Treatment of Hydrolysate, a hazardous byproduct of chemical weapons demilitarization, at two facilities in Pueblo, Colorado and Blue Grass, Kentucky.
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