Dave Leaver, Ph.D.
Principal and Chief Financial Officer

Dave Leaver, Ph.D.
(650) 948-8242

DAVID E. W. LEAVER, Ph.D., Chief Financial Officer is a co-founder and Principal of Polestar. He has been involved in safety analysis and engineering support to the nuclear industry for more than 25 years.

Employed at SAIC from 1975 to 1981, Dave performed some of the earliest probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) studies of nuclear plants including the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Plant and the Big Rock Point. As a co-founder of Delian Corporation, later acquired by Tenera, Dave worked on PRA studies, participated in several independent assessments of nuclear plant operational and engineering readiness, and worked on fossil plant reliability and heat rate improvement.

From 1987 to 1992, Dave was heavily involved in development of safety, source term, and severe accident design requirements for the Advanced Light Water Reactor (ALWR). Under DOE sponsorship, Dave established and led a team of experts in developing a more realistic design basis fission product source term to support ALWR plant design certification. This work directly led to a major NRC effort to update the source term regulations for advanced plants, and later for operating plants, resulting in the alternate source term (AST).

Since co-founding Polestar, Dave has been involved in a variety of source term-related work. He developed new methods for evaluating fission product aerosol transport in containment, which were successfully applied to the Westinghouse AP600 design basis source term. He developed improved methods for predicting aerosol retention in steam generator tube rupture and interfacing loss of coolant accidents, and applied these methods to develop a technical basis for reduced emergency planning zones in ALWRs.

Dave was also the lead technical support for NEI efforts to develop a framework for applying AST to operating plants, and has performed safety-related calculations for over a dozen AST licensing applications.

Dave received his BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He also received an MS degree in Engineering Economic Systems and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. He also served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, stationed at the Division of Naval Reactors.