Government & Policy Roundup

Arden L. Bement Jr. was officially appointed as the 12th director of NSF by President Bush on Nov. 24, following Bement's Senate confirmation. He had been acting director since Feb. 22. Prior to the official appointment, Bement had also served as the director of NIST. His successor as NIST director has not yet been named.

DOE will not apply this year for a license application review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, officials say. The decision is a reversal of earlier announcements that an application was to have been filed this month in order to meet a 2010 opening date for the Nevada repository.

Toxics Release Inventory data for 2003 from industrial facilities are now available online at http://www.epa.gov/tri-efdr. The agency normally would have released aggregated TRI data and an accompanying analysis next spring, but EPA made the 2003 data for individual facilities available earlier because of electronic reporting by industry.