The National Nuclear Security Administration's manager at the Savannah River Site, Nicole Nelson-Jean, is leaving South Carolina for a high-profile leadership post with the Department of Energy's cleanup office.
Nelson-Jean will be Environmental Management's associate principal deputy assistant secretary for field operations by the start of September, the department publicly announced Tuesday. The Washington, D.C., position is two steps below William "Ike" White, an ex-NNSA official who in June 2019 became the first-in-command at Environmental Management.
White in an internal message distributed Monday lauded Nelson-Jean, listing her various accomplishments and accolades.
"I learned how effective of a leader and manager Nicole can be during our shared tenure in NNSA," White wrote, "and I am pleased to welcome her to the EM management team."
Nelson-Jean – brandishing nearly three decades of Energy Department experience – will replace Tom Mooney. Mooney was working in an acting capacity; he will remain with the remediation office and assist Nelson-Jean, documents show.
National Nuclear Security Administration chief Lisa Gordon-Hagerty in a separate internal message said Nelson-Jean served "with great distinction," adding that she looks forward to their continued relationship – this time not up and down, but rather side to side, across the weapons-and-waste aisle.
Nelson-Jean's move to Environmental Management is outwardly abrupt. The pivot away from nuclear weapons, effectively an endless venture, and toward nuclear waste cleanup, a finite task, couldn't be more drastic, either.
Nelson-Jean, a former attache and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory executive, has for months championed plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site, at the proposed Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, and has been a proponent of the tritium buildout here.
White's memo hit on the same points: "Nicole comes to EM from the National Nuclear Security Administration, where she last served as the NNSA Manager at the Savannah River Site leading the site-level effort to establish a plutonium pits capability, the surplus plutonium disposition activities, and the operations of the Nation's only Tritium Plant that supports the nuclear stockpile."
Plutonium pits are nuclear weapon cores. Tritium is a radioactive hydrogen isotope used in nuclear weapons.
Environmental Management, created in 1989, is the Savannah River Site landlord.
In 2018, Nelson-Jean said she was "excited" to be at the Savannah River Site as its National Nuclear Security Administration portfolio was poised for growth.
