Dr. Peter Swift was appointed to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and designated as Chair by President Joseph Biden on September 16, 2024.
Dr. Swift is a consulting geoscientist with over 30 years of experience in high-level radioactive waste management and disposal. He was formerly a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he served from 2011 to 2020 as the National Technical Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy Spent Fuel and Waste Technology Research and Development Campaign. Prior experience includes key roles in the certification and licensing processes for both the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the formerly proposed Yucca Mountain repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in Nevada. Specific to the Yucca Mountain project, he led the total system performance assessment effort that developed estimates of the long-term safety of the site and then served as the Chief Scientist for the program’s Lead Laboratory during DOE’s 2008 submittal of the license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Dr. Swift is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, and a member or past member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and the Geochemical Society.
Dr. Swift received a Ph.D. in Geosciences from the University of Arizona in 1987, Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Geology from the University of Wyoming in 1982 and 1980, and a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1974.