CHARLES PENNINGTON, Chairman and Secretary
Charles W. Pennington is an executive level consultant in spent nuclear fuel storage/transport and radiological design and licensing, having retired from NAC International, Inc. in 2013. As a corporate officer and Vice President at NAC, Mr. Pennington led consulting, development, engineering, nuclear analysis, licensing, and business development over his 18 years there. He also served as an IAEA consultant on technology issues, and as the Director of NAC’s Nuclear Spent Fuel Academy, an educational colloquium on nuclear spent fuel.
Following graduation from Duke University on an NROTC Scholarship with a degree in mathematics, Mr. Pennington served in the US Navy Nuclear Power program as an officer aboard a nuclear submarine. He held positions of responsibility for both the submarine's reactor and for its nuclear weapons. Following this, he received an MS degree from North Carolina State University in Nuclear Engineering and an MBA from the University of Connecticut in Marketing and Finance.
Mr. Pennington led Business Development at NAC for many years prior to his retirement. As Group Senior Vice President of Engineering and Development, he directed NAC’s successful development of several spent fuel technologies. Earlier, Mr. Pennington served as the Group Senior Vice President for Consulting in all nuclear fuel cycle areas.
Before joining NAC, Mr. Pennington was Vice President, Technology and Business Development, for Holtec International, leading the company's initial development of nuclear spent fuel dry storage and transport technology. Prior to that, Mr. Pennington served as Vice President at Transnuclear Inc., a subsidiary of AREVA, leading design development, commercialization, and sales efforts for a number of modular storage and transport systems, resulting in the successful deployment of these systems. He also performed studies for entities like the Electric Power Research Institute on spent fuel technologies and economics, resulting in early testing of such systems.
Mr. Pennington has been involved with nuclear energy for almost 50 years. He holds six patents for nuclear technology involving criticality control, radiation shielding, packaging design, closure/sealing systems, and heat transfer designs. There are more than 600 spent fuel storage and transportation systems deployed globally for which he first led the development, then became responsible for their sales. He is also active in publishing and public outreach efforts, having authored more than 60 published industry papers and journal articles involving nuclear technology, ionizing radiation, and comparative assessments of radiation exposure from nuclear and non-nuclear industries. Additionally, he has provided expert witness services for utilities, supporting their licensing, state approval, and litigation activities, and has delivered both closed-door and public presentations at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as the National Academy of Sciences on the safety and security of dry spent fuel storage and transport. His experience includes responsibility for the commercialization of more than a dozen major storage and transport systems involving both domestic and foreign technologies. In 2010 and 2011, he provided significant input at the request of the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future regarding the comparative safety of nuclear plants and nuclear spent fuel storage and transport systems. He now works with Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information (SARI) in opposition to the application of the scientifically flawed Linear No-Threshold (LNT) hypothesis to low-dose, ionizing radiation and has published several papers and letters with his colleagues in SARI on the LNT hypothesis.