He attended Ordnance Guided Missile School at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and was then transferred to White Sands Proving Ground in 1956.

[18] The B Reactor produced the plutonium used in the first nuclear detonation test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and for “The Fat Man” atomic bomb, which was dropped on Nagasaki to end World War II.

During this eventful two-year period, Ferguson traveled extensively to manage and implement President Jimmy Carter's Nonproliferation Alternative Systems Assessment Program (NASAP)[24] and the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Study (INFCE),[25] which was jointly operated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as bilateral technical exchanges with England, France, Italy, West Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union regarding nuclear energy.

[26] The U.S. had entered into multi-lateral and bi-lateral agreements with other nations for the exchange of fission energy technology following President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace Initiative in 1953.

Most nations went ahead with reprocessing and breeder development until high costs and loss of political support delayed plans in nuclear projects around the world.

[26] Other major events that marked Ferguson's service at DOE were the gasoline shortages during the 1979 energy crisis caused by oil embargoes leveled at the United States during political upheaval in Iran, and the Three Mile Island accident at the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979.

On April 5, 1979, several days into the accident, Ferguson and his staff from DOE traveled to the Three-Mile Island site for a first-hand understanding of the cause, the damage done, and the recovery needs.

[citation needed] The plant was rechristened the Columbia Generating Station and is still in operation, providing low-cost, carbon-free electricity for customers of the Bonneville Power Administration.

Ferguson and Associates, developed the Isaiah Project to address the fate of Ukraine's nuclear weapons, which became the focus of intense proliferation concern by the United States and Russia.

The basic concept of the Isaiah Project was that the project partners — SAIC, Newport News Shipbuilding Corp., and Battelle Memorial Institute — would acquire two of the four partially completed reactor facilities shut down by WPPSS in Washington State, complete construction, and provide $2 billion in private financing for secure storage, under international safeguards, of the 1800 nuclear warheads left in Ukraine after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

[58][59] Instead, the United States persuaded the Ukrainian Rada to ratify the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT)[60] and return all the nuclear weapons in Ukraine to Russia.

[63] In August 2013, the court made a landmark ruling on the case, granting the petitioners a writ of mandamus ordering the NRC to follow the law and resume the Yucca Mountain license review.

[64][65] Two of the three judges on the panel agreed that the NRC had violated the NWPA when its former chairman, Gregory Jaczko, stopped the Yucca Mountain license review and withheld the Safety Evaluation Reports (SERs), which were due to be released to Congress and the public.

[66] Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his opinion, “This case raises significant questions about the scope of the Executive’s authority to disregard federal statutes.

The policy is for Congress and the President to establish as they see fit in enacting statutes, and for the President and subordinate executive agencies to implement within statutory boundaries.” Kavanaugh concluded that the President and federal agencies “may not ignore statutory mandates or prohibitions merely because of policy disagreements with Congress.”[67] The dissenting judge, Chief Judge Merrick Garland, did not contest the law in the decision, but wrote simply that the lack of funds would make the court's ruling “useless” because it amounted to “little more than ordering the commission to spend part of those funds unpacking its boxes, and the remainder packing them up again.”[68] However, the NRC testified during the court hearing that the remaining $11.1 million designated for the Yucca Mountain review would be enough to at least publicly release the Yucca Mountain SERs that Jaczko had held back.

[69] By January 30, 2015, the NRC had completed and released all five volumes of the Yucca Mountain SER, concluding that Nevada's Yucca Mountain met all of its technical and safety requirements for the disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste, stating that “DOE’s proposed repository as designed will be capable of safely isolating used nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste for the 1-million-year period specified in the regulations.”[70][71] Completion of the safety evaluation report does not represent an agency decision on whether to authorize construction.

A final licensing decision, should funds beyond those currently available be appropriated, could come only after completion of a supplement to the DOE's environmental impact statement, hearings on contentions in the adjudication, and Commission review.

Katie's half-brother Howard Crosby is an entrepreneur and a singer with a voice that is reminiscent of his famous Uncle Bing's, and performs for charities in the United States and Ireland.