Atomic Show #329 – Dr. Kathryn Huff, former Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy

The Honorable Dr. Kathryn Huff is an associate professor in the nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the director of the Advanced Reactor Fuels laboratory and currently specializes in nuclear reactor core neutronics and multi-physics modeling.

She served as the Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy from May of 2022 through May of 2024.

We talked about her tenure at the Department of Energy and the somewhat jarring transition from being a university professor with frequent contact with undergraduate students to running a bureaucratic agency inside the Washington beltway. We chatted about the Byzantine and somewhat plodding nature of the federal budgetary process and the reasons why the process was designed to insert a certain amount of deliberative reviews and second checks before making decisions, especially when they carried large monetary implications.

We paid a little extra attention to the process of implementing the Congressional appropriation of $2.72 B for the Domestic Low Enriched Uranium Supply Chain.

We discussed some of the more enjoyable aspects of her position, including the opportunities to teach both decision makers and staff members about the utility of nuclear energy and some of the reasons why it is such a fascinating and important scientific, technological and economic topic. We spoke about her visits to national labs, universities and international centers of nuclear energy research and development.

She mentioned that the opportunity to host students and other groups of young people was one of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of her job. She appreciated the opportunity to share some of her excitement about nuclear energy.

We also talked about several recent Executive Orders with the potential for significant impact on energy in general and nuclear energy more specifically.

One of the Executive Orders that we discussed does not include the word “energy” in its title or anywhere in its text, but it holds the potential to make an impact on the future of nuclear energy development. Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies addresses the independence of certain agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, within the Executive Branch of the federal government. The NRC’s independence has often been described as a major component of its effectiveness as a regulatory body.

Dr. Huff joined with two colleagues to publish a commentary in Scientific American about the possible implications of reducing the NRC’s independence. On the Atomic Show, she offered her perspective and provided some concerns worth thinking about.

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