Mal Knapp is a Senior Nuclear Safety Consultant to Talisman. He has been an independent consultant in nuclear safety and management, with particular emphasis on nuclear waste management and disposal since his retirement from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1999. His consulting clients have included the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy and the International Atomic Energy Agency, including working for the latter two agencies as a full time employee for several months each. He retired from the NRC as Deputy Executive Director for Regulatory Effectiveness, in which he was responsible for all research, investigations, enforcement, and emergency response for the agency. During his twenty-year career with the NRC, he was also Deputy Director of the Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards, where he was a founding co-chair of the Federal Government's Interagency Steering Committee On Radiation Standards (ISCORS), and was Acting Director of the Office of Research. He was also Director of the Waste Management Division, where his responsibilities included high- and low-level radioactive waste management, uranium recovery and decommissioning.
Before becoming Director of that division, he was a principal author of the NRC's generic high level waste disposal regulation, 10 CFR Part 60. From 1989 through 1992 he was the Director of the Division of Radiation Safety and Safeguards in NRC's Region I. There his responsibilities included licensing and inspection associated with about 4,000 materials licensees, and health physics, security and emergency planning for 32 commercial reactors. Prior to joining the NRC in 1979, he worked for the General Electric Company, principally at Corporate Research and Development, where he investigated gas turbine corrosion, heavy water separation and continuous casting of copper rod. He received a B.S.E. and an M.S.E. from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph. D. from Carnegie-Mellon University. All his degrees are in Chemical Engineering.