Moving rapidly to put new leadership atop the unsettled Nuclear Regulatory Commission, President Obama has nominated George Mason University professor Allison M. Macfarlane as a commissioner and also said he would name her as the NRC’s new chair.
Macfarlane was a member of a blue-ribbon panel charged with recommending ways to deal with the growing problem of how to dispose of the country’s nuclear waste. Since 2006, Macfarlane has been an associate professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason, in Fairfax, Va.