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The transformation of the NRC: 50 years of commissioners
The dust is beginning to settle following the whirlwind of changes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the past year, and 2025 ultimately may be viewed as a transformative year, as well as the year the NRC celebrated its golden anniversary. The 12 months of that milestone year brought more change to the agency in its composition, its mandate, and its relationship to the executive branch than any comparable period in the preceding four decades.
Now at 51 years and counting, the NRC is working with a full commission and issuing new rulemakings to both regulate and support the next round of nuclear deployments. With the turbulence of 2025 still fresh in our minds, Nuclear News decided it was a good time to revisit the professional backgrounds of all 42 NRC commissioners who have served over the agency’s 50-year history to see how the composition of the commission has evolved over time.
James R. Lilienthal was elected President of the American Nuclear Society in 1972. He joined the American Nuclear Society in 1958 and served in a number of positions, including chair of the Remote Systems Technology Division, member of the Program Committee, Publications Committee, Board of Directors, Executive Committee, Finance Committee, Nominating Committee, and the 1968 International Meeting Steering Committee.
Lilienthal was born on August 14, 1916. He started his career in 1940, doing acceptance tests and designing servosystems for gyrocompasses and associated fire control equipment for Sperry Gyroscope Company. During the war, he became assistant product engineer for development and production of an airborne gyroscopically stabilized radar system for B29s.
In early 1947, he moved to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now Los Alamos National Laboratory), where he initially headed the Special Problems Group of the Chemistry Metallurgy Research (CMR) Division. There, he worked on the design and construction of the first hot cell laboratory at LASL. This in turn led him, in 1948, to help establish a Hot Laboratory Committee with several others. Among them was Mel Feldman, who would later become ANS president (1975-76). The Hot Laboratory Committee merged with ANS in 1958 and became the Remote Systems Technology Division.
In 1950, Lilienthal became group leader of the Instrumentation and Engineering Group. In that capacity, he designed and handled the instrumentation for the first thermonuclear weapons test codename “Mike,” which took place at Eniwetok in the South Pacific in 1952. He worked on Eniwetok for six weeks as part of a project known as “Operation Ivy.”
Back at LASL, he worked on the design and construction of the CMR Materials Sciences Building in the early 1950s. Later, he worked on another hot cell complex for examining irradiated uranium fuel and irradiated plutonium. In 1967, he was also named assistant division leader of the CMR Division (which later became two divisions—the Chemistry-Materials Science Division and the Chemistry-Nuclear Chemistry Division—with Lilienthal as assistant division leader of both).
He retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1977.
Lilienthal earned a bachelor’s degree in naval architecture and marine engineering from Webb Institute of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering in 1938.
James Lilienthal died on September 8, 1995.
Read Nuclear News from July 1972 for more on Jim Lilienthal.
