Confirming Chu

President Obama’s incoming secretary of energy physicist Steven Chu, faced lots of questions on nuclear power and coal at his Senate confirmation hearing on 13 January. Chu, a leading advocate of renewable energy, told members of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that he supports expansion of the US nuclear power industry and believes that a solution to the nuclear waste storage standoff can be found. The US should consider eventually lifting the ban on the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel that was instituted during the Carter administration. “We’re in a different place and time from then,” said Chu, former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). But given that nuclear fuel is expected to be plentiful for at least the next 10 years, he added there is no urgency to reprocess, and more research should be devoted to developing a reprocessing technology that is more resistant to proliferation than the technologies in commercial use abroad. He pledged to find a solution to the nuclear waste issue, possibly in collaboration with other nations. Obama has promised to terminate the effort to locate a repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, where at least $9.5 billion has been spent just to determine the site’s suitability.

Chu acknowledged that coal will continue to be a vital part of the US energy mix, but only with the addition of carbon capture and storage. Obama favors a cap-and-trade system to control carbon dioxide, Chu said, adding that he personally “philosophically” favors the simplest possible cap-and-trade regime. As for the national labs, he said, “I have challenged some of the best scientists at the Berkeley lab to turn their attention to the energy and climate-change problem and to bridge the gap between the mission-oriented science that [DOE’s] Office of Science does so well and the applied research that leads to energy innovation. I have also worked to partner with academia and industry. I know that these efforts are working, and I want to extend this approach to an even greater extent throughout the department’s network of national laboratories where 30 000 scientists and engineers are at work performing cutting-edge research.”