Steven M. Blush is an Expert Consultant at Talisman International, LLC. He has over 20 years experience in nuclear safety and environmental cleanup supporting the Department of Energy, the National Academy of Sciences and electric utility companies that operate nuclear powerplants. Mr. Blush is a former Director of DOE’s Office of Nuclear Safety, where he was responsible for providing safety oversight of more than 2,700 nuclear facilities and more than 3,000 waste management units within the nuclear weapons and national laboratory complex. In this capacity, Mr. Blush inspected all major nuclear facilities at most DOE nuclear sites. He established field representatives at all of the major DOE sites, and directed a staff that included experts in nuclear and chemical plant operations, maintenance, radiation protection, criticality safety, probabilistic risk assessment, fire protection, emergency preparedness, natural phenomena, human factors engineering, training, procedures writing, accident investigation, and civil, electrical, mechanical, chemical, and nuclear engineering.
Mr. Blush and his staff participated in formal reviews of all new nuclear construction projects, DOE program office budgets, facility readiness reviews, reviews of draft NEPA documentation, contractor award fee determinations, and draft nuclear-safety related DOE orders, guidance documents, and rules. He coordinated with other agencies of the federal government, including the Department of Defense, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and the Office of Management and Budget, and testified before Congress on numerous occasions.
After leaving the government, Mr. Blush was hired by the Rocky Flats Field Office to help formulate new processes for defining the safety bases of facilities at the Rocky Flats site. He later consulted with the United Nations Development Program, assisting in negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency in furtherance of a program to help the 15 former states of the U.S.S.R. improve their radiation protection infrastructures. Mr. Blush previously served as Senior Study Director at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, producing four major reports on nuclear safety research, the safety of the defense production reactors, the safety of DOE research reactors, and the safety of the nuclear weapons complex. He received a B. A. degree from the University of California at Berkeley.