Walter Hill

Senior Consultant with Smith & Harroff and Principal of WH Hill Communications LLC

Walter Hill, principal of WH Hill Communications LLC, has more than 40 years’ experience in communications, public affairs and training.

His clients include electric industry associations, as well as companies engaged in new, innovation designs for small, modular reactors and in shipping and managing nuclear fuel. Working alongside Smith & Harroff, Mr. Hill provides training for emergency spokespeople.

For twenty years, he was senior director, external affairs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, where he was responsible for strategic alignment of more than 500 communications professionals in the nuclear energy industry, providing guidance and training in media and public affairs.

While at NEI, he managed the organization’s emergency response plan, and he directed new reactor communications. He also trained communicators worldwide engaged in both operating and new reactor issues. In addition, he led a multi-disciplinary team to assess and adapt lessons learned from responses to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident and engaged in outreach to decision-makers and opinion leaders in the United States, Europe, Japan and Taiwan. In 2013, he joined an industry team of leaders to brief members of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan and President Ma. He also appeared in Taiwanese national media to address concerns in the wake of Fukushima.

While at NEI, he managed a $2M coalition of 4,000 advocates for nuclear energy chaired by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and Christine Todd Whitman, former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and governor of New Jersey.

He worked alongside Smith & Harroff to guide the industrywide Clean Energy America program, a speakers’ bureau of rising industry leaders, providing training and placements on college campuses and in the media.

Mr. Hill also organized and conducted nuclear communications workshops for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Shenzhen, China; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Vienna, Austria; and Cairo, Egypt.

Previously he was a director of energy programs at Potomac Communications, Inc., in Washington, DC. He also led communications programs as manager of publications at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. Earlier, he was a writer for the $5 billion Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project in Tennessee.

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