Watkins, AIDS Panel Head, to Fill Energy Post

President-elect Bush, filling the final slot in his Cabinet, plans today to name as his secretary of energy retired Adm. James D. Watkins, former chief of naval operations and chairman of the highly regarded presidential commission on AIDS, sources close to Bush said Wednesday.

Watkins, 61, fits one of the prime criteria that Bush has laid out for the energy post--knowledge of the nation’s nuclear industry and the problems of the country’s troubled nuclear weapons plants.

A protege of the late Adm. Hyman Rickover, Watkins served as a nuclear submarine commander and as manager of naval reactors for the Atomic Energy Commission before becoming commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet and the Navy’s chief of operations.

Job Difficult to Fill

The energy job, which President Reagan once pledged to abolish and then treated as a low-profile assignment, has proved to be among the most difficult for Bush to fill. The difficulty has stemmed from conflicting political pressures surrounding the job as well as from the controversial issues the new secretary will face, particularly the massive job of cleaning up the country’s troubled nuclear weapons plants.

Bush, a Texan with a political base in the oil states of the Southwest, had come under intense pressure to pick an energy secretary with ties to the petroleum industry. Numerous oil and gas industry executives had been backing former Louisiana Rep. W. Henson Moore for the post.

With other Bush advisers arguing that picking an energy secretary with oil industry connections would be a political misstep, transition aides in recent weeks floated a series of names of potential nominees for the energy post. Each, in turn, was shot down by fierce opposition, much of it from Bush’s Texas allies.

Watkins, however, does not appear likely to draw that sort of fire. Unlike several of the other people who had been considered, he has no ties to the unpopular energy policies of the Jimmy Carter Administration. And the reviews of his performance in his military posts have been almost uniformly glowing.

“He’s the kind of a guy whose name I keep in my little black book when a job needs to be done,” Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview last year.

The Energy Department has responsibility for producing nuclear material for the nation’s stock of strategic warheads and atomic bombs, and the plants that make that material have deteriorated in recent years.

The plants, built mostly in the 1950s, are now largely shut down because of disrepair and mounting environmental problems. Congressional leaders have estimated that rehabilitating and cleaning them up could cost more than $100 billion.

Waste Piling Up

The department also must find repositories for the radioactive waste generated by the nation’s civilian nuclear industry. The waste--highly radioactive spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors as well as low-level radioactive waste from medical laboratories and other sources--has been piling up in temporary storage around the nation.

President Reagan picked Watkins to head the AIDS panel in October, 1987, after the admiral had served as a member of the commission.

Watkins’ appointment as chairman was viewed as a way to create a more cooperative atmosphere, since the panel had become ensnarled in political problems.

The panel’s final report, released in the summer of 1988, called for passage of a federal law prohibiting discrimination against people infected by the acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus.

Bush, in filling his top posts, still must choose a nominee to take charge of the new Administration’s war on drugs. The job, while not at the Cabinet level, will have equivalent status.

Meanwhile, John H. Sununu, Bush’s White House chief of staff, has finished filling the senior White House staff positions. Among those named: Roger B. Porter, assistant to the President for economic and domestic policy; Stephen M. Studdert, assistant to the President for special activities and initiatives, and Richard Breeden, assistant to the President for issues analysis.

Porter is a professor of business and government at Harvard University, and a former director of Reagan’s White House office of policy development. Studdert is executive director of the inauguration and was a senior White House official during Reagan’s first term. Breeden is a Washington lawyer who has served as a deputy counsel to Bush.