Mr. James Kennedy is a Senior Project Manager at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and has held positions as a senior staff member and a manager in NRC’s low-level waste (LLW) program for over 20 years. In these roles, he has been the principal spokesperson for the LLW program and the NRC on LLW matters for many years.
The Commission recognized Mr. Kennedy for his extraordinary leadership and innovation in changing the focus of the NRC’s regulatory framework for the management of radioactive waste to an approach that is directly related to safety and is based on risk assessment and performance requirements. These changes to the NRC’s regulatory policy for waste management are expected to result in safer, more secure, transparent, and efficient NRC regulated management of waste in the United States.
EnergySolutions, the Utah Department of Environmental Quality (UDEQ), the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors (CRCPD), and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) were also recognized with an honorable mention in the 2013 Hodes Award program for their innovative, collaborative effort to develop a program for cost-effective disposal of certain sealed sources at the EnergySolutions disposal facility in Clive, Utah.