Koonin sees social sciences as key to future research
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0580
Steven Koonin, whom the US Senate confirmed as the Department of Energy’s undersecretary of science in April 2009, resigned on 18 November. A former Caltech provost and chief scientist at BP, Koonin is now working at the Institute for Defense Analyses, an Alexandria, Virginia, think tank that provides advice to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, NSF, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Agency. The following is an edited transcript of his 22 November conversation with Physics Today.
PT : Why did you decide to leave DOE?
KOONIN : When I took on the quadrennial technology review (QTR) in January I told the secretary I’d be happy to do that, but that was probably the note upon which I wanted to leave the department. More generally, if you’ve never been inside the government, government years are like dog years, and two and a half years makes it feel like it’s about time to step down. Plus I had done pretty much what I had set out to do, which was to move along some technology programs—exascale [computing], inertial fusion—and give a greater shape and coherence to what the department does overall, and in particular what it would do in energy. There was a strategic plan issued last March and I was the principal architect of that document.
PT : Will the QTR and the strategic plan have any impact on setting budget priorities?
KOONIN : One of the problems with the department is that it is appropriated and authorized by multiple entities. And there are separate examiners for nuclear energy, for fossil energy, for renewables, and they’re all sort of trying to do the same thing. Why is it we have separate examiners at the Office of Management and Budget? We don’t get as much synergy, as much coordination as we would like, and the QTR is some attempt to lay all that out and try to get a more coordinated story.
PT : But the Department of Defense has separate budget examiners for different programs.
KOONIN : Maybe, but DOD has career organizations that stretch across the entire department. And the DOE has none of that. So you have to drill down to the level of a deputy assistant secretary in fossil and nuclear or renewables or the grid to find a career employee. So when the political crew changes out, with a mean lifetime of two years or something like that, I wouldn’t say that all coordinating activities are lost, but there are great centrifugal tendencies that tend to take over. The defense mission has been recognized as central to the government for the last 200 and some years, and we have put mechanisms in place that ensure thoughtful and enduring defense policy. The National Security Council is another element in this, [as are] the special congressional committees. We have none of that for energy.
PT : How would you address that absence?
KOONIN : The QTR does propose some steps to deal with this. And one is to create for the energy technologies an enduring office that mixes technology together with economic and business analysis, and together with policy and social science, to more effectively define and coordinate the energy technology programs. I believe you need a good healthy dose of social science perspective. This is about people, about how they appreciate risk, adapt to change, discount rates, accept new technologies. Nowhere in the department, in fact, nowhere in the government, do we have that kind of thinking together with energy. When I say enduring, I mean an office of more than a handful for the whole policy, planning, and analysis function for energy technologies.
PT : Did you find your experience at BP useful in your undersecretary role?
KOONIN : Absolutely. Energy needs to happen through the private sector. It owns, builds, operates essentially all the energy infrastructure in the country, and I don’t think we have any intention of changing that. So if you’re going to be effective in technology development and regulation, you really have to understand the private sector and how it thinks. That doesn’t mean that you fold to it; there has to be a healthy tension between the government and the private sector. But you do have to understand it, and I could wish for more people in the government who had that experience. In fact I would say more generally that many of the people reading Physics Today are in the academic world, and if they want to really change energy, I would strongly recommend six months or a year out in the private sector, whether in a big company or a small startup. It really is a very different mindset than what a basic [academic] researcher has.
PT : That would be enough time? A sabbatical?
KOONIN : Look, you’d like more, but you will have the realities of academic cycle. Go sit inside a big energy company. And I’m not the only person who’s done that. Boy, does it change your view of what’s important and what’s possible, of how things happen, and so on.
PT : Do you think the energy companies would invite them?
KOONIN : I think for the right kinds of researchers, they would. I’ve made that suggestion on a number of occasions to corporate folks, and there seems to be enthusiasm in the abstract.
PT : Turning to DOE science, I know that you’ve been involved with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) for decades now in one way or another.
KOONIN : My favorite laser. This is a 40- to 50-year effort that the Department of Energy has embarked upon for several scientific reasons. One is weapon science, and people are very pleased with what is being accomplished there. The second is basic science. Lots of things can be done [with NIF] in atomic physics, hydrodynamics, equation of state, materials properties, and so on. That program is getting pretty well defined. It needs [experimental] time at the facility, and that will come in the next few years.
The third thing we have built the laser for is ignition. You’ve got a well-functioning but complicated tool in the hands of a talented group of scientists who have brought the diagnostics up and have figured out a lot of the target fabrication issues. They are now doing what physicists do: figuring out how to make it all play together. (See “NIF ignition milestone remains elusive with 10 months to go.”) It probably is going to take longer than the deadline of next September that someone, sometime ago set [for the ignition experiments]. I think we need to make as good a run at that as we can, bearing in mind that there is a possibility we are not going to make it. And we need to lay the groundwork for a plan B.
PT : Do you think the ignition campaign would be able to get funded for such a plan B?
KOONIN : You’ve got to see where they are going to get to in August or whenever you’re going to declare the deadline, but it would be a shame to have gotten as close as they should get and not carry it through. [The ability to build NIF] is uniquely a US skill, or technology, right now. We’ve invested so much to get us to this point already, and the payoff is awfully big.
PT : Should the ignition campaign be open-ended?
KOONIN : No, and I think they have good metrics for progress, [a formula known as] the ignition threshold factor. They are tracking that and it’s been going up, but not as fast as everybody would like. I think the next five months will really tell. They would like to see the ITF get up to about 0.3 or so [where an ITF of 1.0 provides a 50% chance of achieving ignition in any given shot], and then you will start to get into really new physics.
PT : When you came to DOE, you were really keen on inertial fusion as a potential energy source. Do you still feel that way?
KOONIN : When you look at the urgency of the problems that we have in energy, and you look at the scale of capital investment, which frankly any fusion energy source is going to take, plus the time that it’s going to take to mature it, if you want to solve the energy problem in the next few decades, this is not what you would be doing. That said, it’s an interesting long-term possibility. As you know, I spun up a [National Academies review of inertial fusion energy] that is asking what should DOE, and the government more broadly, be doing to try to understand the energy potential of that technology.
PT : But have you become more optimistic or pessimistic since you’ve been at DOE?
KOONIN : I think we have other technologies that we can be pursuing for energy that will be a bigger payoff sooner. I think I have a healthy skepticism and realism here.
PT : More so than when you arrived?
KOONIN : Yeah.
PT : You have been very enthusiastic about scientific computing and simulations. Do you share [former DOE Office of Science director] Raymond Orbach’s view that scientific computing has become nearly as important to science as theory and experimentation?
KOONIN : We’re realizing more and more of that vision over the last few years. When you start to make serious predictions about catalyst properties, for example, through computation, or you start to understand the structure of galaxies better through gravitational end-body simulations, all of that is the science potential. I’m equally enthusiastic about the engineering potential of simulations. A number of commercial companies—Boeing, Cummins, Caterpillar, Goodyear—have demonstrated the value of simulation in energy-related matters. We should be doing a lot more of that. The benefits are, obviously, you can optimize design and shorten the design cycle. In some energy applications, going to scale is a fundamental problem. We can prove out a catalyst at the lab bench, but it takes 20 years until you can have the confidence to invest $5 billion in a full-scale facility. If we could shorten that time through better simulation, that’s going to help a lot.
PT : So should simulation be used more broadly throughout science and engineering?
KOONIN : Yes, I think that is something that we should be doing. The US has a lead in [scientific computing] because of the [nuclear weapons] stockpile stewardship program that’s been underway for 15 years. We have created a simulation expertise that has broader applications. But we mustn’t lose that; the rest of the world isn’t sitting still. This is one of the things that is going to let the US compete in manufacturing in a very competitive global environment. But industry doesn’t have the expertise necessarily to do this kind of thing; it’s resident in the labs and in academia. And it’s not so much about hardware. It’s about codes, validation, and so on. Some industries need to be convinced. Others are already there. And they need to have a way to get their feet in the water, so to speak, without having to make a major investment of time and people.
Related to all that is high-performance computing and the exascale which is something else that I championed during my time at the department. The labs are at petascale [computing] now. Twenty-four senators signed a [8 November] letter to the administration saying that there really needs to be an exascale program.
PT : What’s your next career move?
KOONIN : I think that come the start of the next academic year, I will be at one or another of the nation’s great universities. My interests are now infusing the social sciences and policy together with technology. For some of our biggest problems, whether energy or other big problems in society, the technology is in many ways the easy part. The rate-limiting steps for many of our problems are societal: How people behave, what incentives there are, etc. I think the social sciences have a lot to bring to that discussion that has not really been exploited yet. That’s the direction I’m headed in; it’s still science, and it’s still in some ways goal-driven. But we’ve got to pay attention and better understand the human issues here: Policy, behavior, economics, perception, and how we fuse that with technology. I’m looking for a venue in which to execute that program, and several universities seem to be pretty interested.
PT : Will you be rejoining JASON?
KOONIN : I have rejoined JASON.
More about the authors
David Kramer, dkramer@aip.org
