Dana Powers, PhD

Dana Powers is a former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist.

Shortly after his arrival at Sandia in 1974, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) asked Powers to consult on metallurgy issues. After Three Mile Island—a pressurized-water reactor in Pennsylvania that partially melted down in 1979—Powers became heavily involved in researching chemical and metallurgical conditions at the plant. He was appointed a consultant to the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island.

In 1981, Powers became supervisor of Sandia’s Reactor Safety Research Division, which conducted analytic and experimental studies of severe reactor phenomena in fast reactors, as well as light-water reactors, the most common in the US today.

From 1988-1991, Powers was a member of the then-DOE Advisory Committee for Nuclear Facility Safety, which later became the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. He was responsible for the development of safety research programs for the DOE’s nuclear facilities.

Three years later, he was appointed to the NRC’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. He served as chairman in 1999 and 2000 and received a Distinguished Service Award in 2001.

Powers received a bachelor’s in chemistry and a doctorate in chemistry, chemical engineering and economics from the California Institute of Technology.