Keep Biden’s Anti-Nuclear Zealot out of the Government

O n May 3, President Joe Biden nominated Annie Caputo and Bradley Crowell to fill vacant chairs on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Caputo is highly qualified. She holds a B.S. in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin and has experience in the nuclear industry, working for the Exelon Corporation. From 2005 to 2006 and again from 2012 to 2015, she worked for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce handling nuclear issues, subsequently serving as senior policy adviser to John Barraso (R., Wyo.) on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. In May 2018, she was appointed by President Trump to be an NRC commissioner, serving in that capacity until June 2021. President Biden is to be commended for nominating her.

Crowell, however, is another matter. A political-science graduate of Cornell University, Crowell served from 1999 to 2001 as a legislative assistant for anti-science senator Richard Bryan, a man whose staunch opposition to radio astronomy earned him a denunciation from NASA. From 2004 to 2007, he was a legislative advocate for the antinuclear Natural Resources Defense Council, a group so fanatical in opposition to nuclear energy that, even in the face of its putative deep commitment to fight “the existential threat of climate change,” it continues to push for shutting down all nuclear-power plants. From 2007 to 2010, he served as a senior adviser for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Crowell then joined Obama’s antinuclear Department of Energy, serving as assistant secretary for the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs from 2010 to 2016. In December 2016, Crowell was appointed to serve as director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources by Governor Brian Sandoval. In that capacity, he led the fight to stop the establishment of a safe nuclear-waste-disposal facility under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

Antinuclear activists like to claim that there is no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste. This is simply untrue. As reformed environmentalist Gwyneth Cravens explains in her excellent book Power to Save the World, there are many ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste. The easiest one is to glassify it into non-water-soluble form and drop it into sediments in the mid-Pacific that have been geologically stable for hundreds of millions of years — and will continue to be for hundreds of years from now. Unfortunately, the Carter administration aborted such plans, and the antinuclear Greenpeace organization managed to obtain an international ban on such operations. (The ban expires in 2025. It should not be renewed.) That left the option of disposal on land in geologically stable formations. This is how both the French nuclear industry and the U.S. nuclear Navy disposes of their waste (in our case, in underground salt formations in New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant).

However, in 1974, the Sierra Club, which had previously supported nuclear power as an environmentally cleaner alternative to coal, reversed its position on the grounds that nuclear energy could lead to “unnecessary economic growth.” Following that decision, the Club’s leadership identified preventing the disposal of the commercial nuclear industry’s waste as a key tactic for strangling the industry. As part of this initiative, the establishment of a safe nuclear-waste-disposal facility under Yucca Mountain has been stonewalled, forcing the industry to instead store its waste in cooling ponds at its plant sites. As these are spread around the country in numerous locations close to major metropolitan areas, it should be apparent that the antinuclear activists’ campaign against remote underground desert disposal is not motivated by concern over public health and safety. On the contrary, they are trying to make nuclear power as unsafe as possible, or at least appear as unsafe as possible, in order to wreck the industry.

The fact that Crowell has served as a willing agent of this malicious campaign should disqualify him for nomination to the post of NRC Commissioner. President Biden should withdraw his nomination. If he does not, the Senate should refuse to confirm this deeply inappropriate appointment.