Meet Cynthia Pederson, The Upper Midwest’s New Nuclear Administrator

Cynthia Pederson, the new regional administrator of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), is promising strong oversight of aging nuclear power plants in the Upper Midwest.

Cynthia Pederson is the first woman to head a region for the NRC. The 30-year-old Pederson promises to work on boosting diversity in the federal agency, especially as many older NRC workers in technical jobs retire.

Meantime, she will also have her hands full with regulating 15 commercial nuclear power plants in the Midwest, many of them older facilities in an era where high costs are shutting nuclear plants down.

The Palisades Plant in southwest Michigan is the closest facility to Wisconsin appearing to have significant performance problems. Pederson says the NRC is closely watching Palisades. “It’s a plant that we have done a lot of extra inspection work for,” she says. “This year we’re putting in an additional 1,000 hours of staff attention to Palisades.”

Pederson says the NRC would like to see Palisades do better. She says she’s satisfied that the Point Beach Plant in Wisconsin has corrected some minor problems recently identified there, but promises more reviews of the plant’s long-term plans to be ready for natural disasters like flooding.

Then there’s the recently closed plant at Kewaunee; Pederson says decommissioning is going according to plan, but that the NRC will keep watch.

“We currently have a fulltime inspector still at the Kewaunee facility,” she says. “He continues to be our eyes and ears on site.”

Pederson says it remains up to Kewaunee’s owner Dominion as to whether decommissioning will take up to 60 years, long after the newly promoted regional administrator retires.