Amir Afzali

Amir Afzal is a Senior Regulatory Advisor for Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA) Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

Afzali’s 40 years of experience includes working in a variety of roles including Policy and Licensing Director – Next Generation Reactors at Southern Company Services, Risk-Informed engineering Department Director at Southern Nuclear Operating Company and several other utilities and consulting companies as Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) practitioner, PRA Supervisor, and Fire Protection Supervisor.

In addition to his work with the SoTeRiA Research Laboratory, Afzali is currently a member of Technical Advisory Committee for the Japanese Nuclear Risk Research Center. He is also the CEO of the newly-formed Nuclear Consulting Group. In this role, Amir works with private and public sectors on regulatory and policy topics to enable nuclear energy to be a viable option for providing clean, affordable, and reliable energy.

Previous to his current roles, Amir acted as the Licensing and Policy Director for Advanced Reactors for Southern Company. In that role, he led development, execution, and communication of regulatory and policy plans for enabling advanced reactors to be an option for Southern Company. Examples of his work in this area include being the principal investigator for the Licensing Modernization Project where a technology inclusive risk-informed-performance-based approach was developed to enable a rationalist approach for establishing an advanced reactor’s safety case.

Previous to that, Amir was the Risk-Informed Engineering Department Director at Southern Nuclear Company. In this role, he closely collaborated with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and industry partners to pilot a number of Risk-Informed/Performance-Based (RIPB) programs. These efforts resulted in Southern Company’s nuclear power plants to gain significant operational flexibility and cost savings as well as paving the way for the other utilities to deploy these First-of-A-Kind (FOAK) programs.

Amir has also worked in various roles at Diablo Canyon Power Plant and Dominion Energy as well as a couple of consulting companies, where he led progressive deployment of innovative solutions through use of practical strategies and tactical steps.