Biography

Dr. Robert J. Budnitz has been involved with nuclear-reactor safety and radioactive-waste safety for many years, with an emphasis on seismic safety, probabilistic-risk-assessment methods, and using risk insights in regulation. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He recently retired (spring 2017) from the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he continues as an affiliate and guest scientist.  From 2002 to 2007 he was at UC’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, during which period he worked on a two-year special assignment (late 2002 to late 2004) in Washington to assist the Director of DOE’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management to develop a new Science & Technology Program. Prior to joining LLNL in 2002, he ran a one-person consulting practice in Berkeley CA for over two decades. In 1978-1980, he was a senior officer on the staff of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, serving as Deputy Director and then Director of the NRC Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research. In this two-year period, Dr. Budnitz was responsible for formulating and guiding the large NRC research program, that constituted over $200 million/year at that time. His responsibilities included assuring that all major areas of reactor-safety research, waste-management research, and fuel-cycle-safety research necessary to serve the mission of NRC were adequately supported. From 1967-1978, he was on the staff of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, serving in 1975-1978 as Associate Director of LBL and Head of LBNL’s Energy & Environment Division. During this period, the programs under his direction were in a large mix of diverse areas relevant to DOE, including energy-efficiency, deep-geologic radioactive waste disposal, solar energy, geothermal energy, fusion energy, transportation technology, chemical-engineering for alternate fuels, environmental instrumentation, air-pollution phenomena, and energy policy analysis. He earned a Ph.D. in experimental physics from Harvard in 1968 and a B.A. from Yale in 1961.