NEI Nuclear Notes

If you cover the nuclear news world during the later years of the Bush administration, there was no missing Ward Sproat, who turned up at virtually every Congressional hearing having anything to do with nuclear energy. He was Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management and essentially the voice of Yucca Mountain from 2006 until last year. Despite expressing some doubt that his office would submit the the brown mound’s license application to the Department of Energy by the office’s target date (see here for some gloom on his part), he and his staff did get the application done, a nice capstone for his tenure. We can only hope it won’t be the last good news about Yucca. Anyway, we were quite happy to see him land some work post government service: Bechtel today announced the appointment of Edward F. (Ward) Sproat, III as Senior Project Manager at Bechtel Power Corporation, effective May 11, 2009. He will become the Project Director f...

The following is an early release of a story that's scheduled to run in the Monday, January 21 edition of Nuclear Energy Overview, NEI 's members only publication. It was written by my NEI colleague, Rich Bickers: The Energy Department’s director of radioactive waste management last week told Nevada legislators and the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board that a 2008 license application for the Yucca Mountain repository is still possible, even though the agency continues to evaluate the impact of a more than $100 million reduction in the repository program’s 2008 budget. The projected 2017 opening date for the repository, however, is no longer achievable, Ward Sproat, director of DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told the Nevada State Legislative Committee and the review board at meetings last week in Nevada. Sproat said DOE expects to decide on a new projected opening date sometime this spring. Sproat said that the license application process was still o...