Obama formally named Steven Chu his nominee for energy secretary at a press conference Monday afternoon. Here are the top five reasons he is one of the best cabinet picks in recent memory:
5. His “views on climate change would be among the most forceful ever held by a cabinet member.” He said last year, scientists had come to “realize that the climate is much more sensitive than we thought” (see Scientists are Underestimating Climate Change, Part I). He said people who said they were uncertain whether climate change is being caused by humans were “reminiscent of the dialogue in the 1950s and ‘60s on tobacco.” In a speech earlier this year, he said that climate change of the scale we face “will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements ... We’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently.”
4. As a Chinese American and Nobel Prize winner, he will be uniquely poised to help enable the crucial energy and climate negotiations the Obama team must undertake immediately with the world’s other big emitter. The AP reports from China:
China’s media are cheering President-elect Barack Obama’s pick of Chinese-American Steven Chu for the post of U.S. energy secretary, saying it bodes well for future cooperation between the two countries.
Photographs of Chu, who was born in St. Louis to Chinese parents, were printed on the front pages of major newspapers Friday, illustrating the pride China takes in the achievements of the vast Chinese diaspora.
The state-owned China Daily cited Chinese academics as saying Chu’s ethnic background would ease cooperation between China and the U.S.
“Chu’s presence will make the cooperation smoother,” it cited Tsinghua University scholar Zhou Shijian as saying.
3. He has experience running a major DOE lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, so he knows the archaic and bureaucratic DOE system well. When I came to DOE in the summer of 1993, it took me over a year to figure out how to really get things done. He will have a huge head start over any energy secretary in recent memory.
2. The lab he runs is responsible for developing the technologies that have paid for all the clean energy research the tax payers have ever supported. So while even the most knowledgeable clean energy experts focus too much on supply side solutions, Chu will ensure efficiency gets the equal time it deserves.
1. He isn’t fooled by clean coal claptrap. Earlier this year he said, “Coal is my worst nightmare”:
If coal is to stay part of the world’s energy mix, he says, clean-coal technologies must be developed. But he’s not very optimistic: “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal,” he concluded, given the sheer scope of the challenge of economically storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground.
Worried about radioactivity? Coal’s still your bogeyman. Dr. Chu says a typical coal plant emits 100 times more radiation than a nuclear plant, given the flyash emissions of radioactive particles.
For the foreseeable future—and perhaps beyond that—we will have to tackle the climate challenge without carbon capture. Fortunately we can —and even more fortunately, we finally have an energy secretary who understands that.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Obama administration officials grateful for early spring
Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:01 pm
15 Dec 2008
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:35 pm
15 Dec 2008
He didn't deal with the financial aspect of new nuclear. I'm not sure that we realized how expensive new nuclear would be back then.
And I don't think we realized that we could get our baseload from wind for about the same price as new nuclear while avoiding the problems with nuclear (which he does recognize). The Stanford baseload study has only been out since 2007.
Wonder what he's thinking these days?
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amazingdrx Posted 12:48 am
16 Dec 2008
"The fear of radiation shouldn't even enter into this," he said in comparing nuclear and coal. "Coal is very, very bad." Chu, a physicist, repeated a claim of nuclear proponents that coal plants produce more radioactivity than nuclear plants--a contention based on coal containing trace amounts of uranium and thorium.
The same old false dilemna fallacy perpetrated by nuclear power advocates over and over again. The choice is not between coal and nuclear power. Neither are safe and cost effective.
One would have to assume that Chu understands basic reasoning, that makes the repitition of this lame talking point an intentional error, an attempt to mislead. Not a good sign.
I figured he would be pro-fusion, but pro-fission in its present state? With "friends" like this in charge of administration energy policy, we don't need Cheney.
He could at least conceded that a next generation waste neutralizing reactor is the better course for nuclear power, and put the building of present reactor technology on hold until an R&D experimental test program proves the next generation design.
Accept that compromise or admit you are nothing more than a nuclear power industry advocate Dr. Chu.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Karen Street Posted 3:30 am
16 Dec 2008
Jon, what are the chances that a director of a national lab, who will hear from those he works with and others when he makes mistakes about policy and science, is very wrong on this kind of stuff? People at the national labs were seriously interested in finding solutions to climate change when I became interested in 1995, and had been for years. I don't know why some consider that they just haven't been thinking about the issues enough.
What are the chances that Chu's thinking fairly accurately reflects the thinking of those who have been studying the issues, and are passionate to find answers? In my own presentations, I assume they are good. That doesn't mean that the group who does high level discernment of peer reviewed work is always right--I've had to change my presentations often as their conclusions change. But it is my experience that these conclusions don't shift in the direction of the non-peer reviewed work.
Also see the conclusions of Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future, which he co-chaired.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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mattstambaugh Posted 3:45 am
16 Dec 2008
Matt Stambaugh
Webmaster & Contributor
http://www.thegreeniuses.com
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:18 am
16 Dec 2008
The lab Chu heads was originally involved in nuclear research, so I would expect a certain amount of bias from him. I don't mean that he isn't an excellent pick, which he seems to be, I just think that environmentalists should be aware that he has a pro-nuke outlook.
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Bob Wallace Posted 4:24 am
16 Dec 2008
Nuclear makes a lot of sense if you ignore 1) cost and 2) public opposition.
We can do the job without nuclear and most likely do it for less money if we leave out nuclear. And almost certainly we can get there quicker. And that's obviously a big issue....
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Karen Street Posted 5:00 am
16 Dec 2008
They cite IEA World Energy Outlook 2004 as baseline: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/2004.asp
But you can get more recent versions of World Energy Outlook, or at least parts of them, at IEA: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/
The WEO provides the BAU analysis others use.
When the national labs do a report that economists don't like, they need to redo it. Chu understands that economics is important. It's also true that everyone who is pro-nuclear is aware of a substantial amount of anti-nuclear feeling. Indeed, when I read in peer-reviewed sources about problems with nuclear power, it most frequently lists not nuclear waste, for example, as public perceptions of nuclear waste. People addressing climate change are addressing the understanding of legislators, environmental groups, and the public. See the recommendations in Lighting the Way.
I hope that Bob and all other readers who really care about addressing climate change are doing their darndest to turn public perception around. (It's already started, I'd guess that about 1/4 of the anti-nuclear power people I know won't change ever, and most of the others have shifted or are showing definite pre-shift understandings.)
The quality of our lives depends on it; for many species, it's the chance to continue to exist.
Karen Street
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Bob Wallace Posted 5:38 am
16 Dec 2008
Someone who has yet to understand that we can solve our energy problems without building new nukes?
Probably solve them faster and for less money by not including new nukes?
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:39 am
16 Dec 2008
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PhilMitchell Posted 4:37 am
17 Dec 2008
Not true on either account. Arjun Makhijani, a respected nuclear physicist and energy analyst has written an excellent book, Carbon-Free and Nuclear Free, detailing how to get there from here w/o nuclear.
Amory Lovins has recently published The Nuclear Illusion in Ambio, the journal of the Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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Karen Street Posted 1:33 pm
17 Dec 2008
Makhijani's book has not gone through peer review. I've never seen anything of Makhijani that has been peer reviewed, and would be interested in knowing if anything he has written has been so reviewed (after his PhD). He is not a nuclear physicist but an advocate.
Remember, peer means elite, not equals--some farmers tried to assert that farmers are peers of farmers and so could peer review one another's work.
I couldn't find Lovins article at the Ambio site. I did find Nov 08 preprint from Lovins' group saying it would be published in Ambio in November. Could you find the article at the Ambio site for me? I'm not sure that a pre-print, such as Lovins produced, is standard. In my experience, some magazines post online versions early, but the author does not.
Karen Street
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Bob Wallace Posted 2:01 pm
17 Dec 2008
"Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms"
CRISTINA L. ARCHER AND MARK Z. JACOBSON
JOURNAL OF APPLIED METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATOLOGY NOVEMBER 2007
(Abstracted Abstract)
.... Interconnecting wind farms through the transmission grid is a simple and effective way of reducing deliverable wind power swings caused by wind intermittency. As more farms are interconnected in an array, wind speed correlation among sites decreases and so does the probability that all sites experience the same wind regime at the same time. The array consequently behaves
more and more similarly to a single farm with steady wind speed and thus steady deliverable wind power.
In this study, benefits of interconnecting wind farms were evaluated for 19 sites, located in the midwestern United States .... It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric
power.
---
This tells us that connecting multiple wind farms we can rely on a minimum of 33% of overall measured output as 100% reliable. If we had no electricity option other than wind we would need to build 3x as many turbines as our power needs.
(Linking wind farms from other geographic areas would increase the 33%, lower the 3x.)
Given that wind (best sites, best technology) can be produced for $0.05 kWh that would mean that we would need to spend a maximum of $0.15 per kWh to supply our needs. (And the price of wind generated electricity is expected to fall.)
Of course we don't need to depend totally on wind.
We have existing hydro, might as well use the nuclear that we have, solar thermal can provide well-priced peak power and solar PV is reaching grid parity.
There are conservation and load shifting.
And quite promising are geothermal, tidal and even slow flow hydro is quite likely.
None of the above mentioned sources are as expensive as new nuclear. And none of them bring the same safety/waste disposal problems to the table as does nuclear.
All can be installed much faster than we can build new nuclear, thus allowing us to more rapidly reduce our carbon output.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:54 pm
17 Dec 2008
Top level energy department leaders, meaning those in control of policy, all drink the nuclear coolade. The National Renewable Energy Lab gets a pittance, all the big energy dollars go to the "rad lab" and similar research centers.
That's why we need a new regime at the DOE. Big reform is necessary. Revolving door nuclear energy and weapons industry insider and DOE administration has given us this leagacey of waste, massive contamination, and leaky and vulnerable reactors.
Admit that a new generation of waste neutralizing reactor design is needed and that R&D will take at least 10 years Karen. Chu should admit that too. No more nuclear power of the obsolete problematic mode presently deployed should be built.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 4:13 pm
17 Dec 2008
There's a ton of good stuff in there.
One of Lovins' points that isn't made often enough is the very long time that nuclear plants have to operate before they pay themselves off and return gains to the investors. Decades.
This very long time frame makes investing in new nuclear very risky. One takes the chance that a less expensive power won't enter the market 5 - 10 - 20 years down the road and destroy the nuclear plant's revenue stream.
All that needs happen is for something like dry rock thermal (projected to be ~$0.10 per kWh)or relatively inexpensive storage to be developed and sales from more expensive nuclear plants would be impossible.
Intelligent private money is not going to fund nuclear.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:35 pm
17 Dec 2008
I smell another bail out if we go nuclear like Chu wants to. Then there is still the huge waste problem. I wish Chu and friends would check out the problems with "glow trains", the deadly dangerous method of hauling nuclear waste in casks on trains.
And actually smart grid technology already features built in inexpensive storage, plenty to make renewables do the job baseload does now, a lot more reliably. That makes nukes obsolete yesterday.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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amazingdrx Posted 4:40 pm
17 Dec 2008
You're dreaming. Nuclear dreams, hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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vakibs Posted 9:31 pm
17 Dec 2008
Only the religious anti-nukes believe that nuclear power is costly. Nobody else does.
To produce 1 MW of electric power nuclear needs 40 megatons of steel and 190 m^3 of concrete. To produce the same amount of power, wind power (admittedly the cheapest renewable alternative) needs 460 megatons of steel and 870 m^3 of concrete. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 90% and wind has about 25 to 30%.
Why would nuclear be more expensive than wind ?
But I agree with you on public opposition. Nuclear has a lot more opposition than wind. It is unfortunate, and has a lot to do with how fossil fuel interests have infiltrated green camps.
Let's think in terms of eco-dollars.
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Karen Street Posted 11:24 pm
17 Dec 2008
Jacobson's ideas on wind power were widely attacked as too optimistic in Science magazine a few years ago by other pro-wind advocates, such as David Keith.
After peer review, which is the minimum we should look for, comes the discernment of the community. We can read, for example, major national lab reports, National Academy of Sciences, International Energy Agency, and IPCC to see how the ideas are received. I have seen no indication in any of these analyses that the policy community has accepted Jacobson's thinking on how ubiquitous wind power can be. If you find a top level analysis that finds a way to get there from here without seriously expanding nuclear power, I'd be interested in reading it.
In the absence of such analysis, it looks like those who oppose nuclear power are more interested in picking and choosing solutions than in seriously addressing climate change. I heard Jim Hansen last night, talking about the likely unattainable goal of 350 ppm CO2, though really 300 - 325 ppm would be much better for people and species. He showed pictures of some of those species, and some of those people (his grandchildren). I would think that finding ways to extend the set of solutions, eg, finding carrots and sticks to get people out of planes, would do more than attacking the too-small set of solutions that now exists.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:54 am
18 Dec 2008
As far as why other people aren't following Jacobson's lead, again, there may be some institutional barriers in that much of this work does not fit neatly into academic boundaries, but also perhaps other researchers simply aren't interested in following up on Jacobson. After all, I believe Hansen was something of a lone wolf on climate change for a while, until everyone else caught up with him (and off topic, the earlier issues of World Energy Outlook are free).
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Karen Street Posted 1:12 am
18 Dec 2008
Peer review in economics journals take a good portion of a year, much slower than for science. Science magazine often gets early versions online, before they can get the article into the magazine, say a couple of months later.
Perhaps people are not following Jacobson is because the data they look at don't lead them to the same conclusions. Remember, this is not an isolated field few are looking at. All of this work gets much consideration. If Jacobson really is a leader rather than a diversion, I will see his ideas appear in the uber-reports. Once I see ideas in the uber-reports, I share them in my presentations.
I have never heard that Hansen was a lone wolf on climate change. What he was willing to do was say this is our middle picture analysis at a time when error bars were really large.
The lone wolf argument appears often, that Galileo was right in addressing the non-scientific establishment, and he was a lone wolf, or something, and so being a lone wolf often leads to being right in addressing the scientific establishment. This is sometimes true, but not so often. Much more often, being alone in your thinking, as some policy and climate skeptics are, means that other experts have looked at your thinking and rejected it.
Jacobson may turn out to be right, and the overwhelming number of policy people speaking in fields he hasn't studied (eg, nuclear power) may turn out to be wrong. I personally don't feel comfortable cherry-picking the ideas of individuals in fields I haven't studied.
One more thing, and I've said this many times: when I began looking at climate change in 1995, the science and policy establishments had turned all their thoughts to climate change. Meanwhile, a decade later, environmentalists are paying a great deal of attention to non-issues like mercury in the food chain because of coal. I have heard that until An Inconvenient Truth, environmental groups did not even cover climate change in every single monthly magazine. It's not as if scientists and policy experts aren't studying the issues. They need 3 - 5 times more R&D money, yes. But the assumption that people don't pick up on my favorite answer or problem through lack of expertise on their part is not one I have found over time to have validity.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:07 am
18 Dec 2008
Even in the case of intermittency, I suppose it would always be possible to simply build enough batteries -- sure, you could argue that cost would be an issue, but the technical feasability of such a system doesn't seem impossible. So to some extent, in both the case intermittency and the feasability of building, we have engineering questions. Why not at least model what such a society would look like? It might require a decent amount of resources, and teams of both engineers and scientists, but climate modeling also requires resources.
I don't know whether this is relevant, but the peak oil activists seem to have been way out in front of academia and the press (I have no idea how academia is handling the issue of peak oil). The main peak oil activists had been,first, engineers, and then journalists. So it is not inconceivable that a similar process could take place in terms of redesigning the society to be carbon-free and sustainable (and as always, thanks for links to the literature).
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:17 am
18 Dec 2008
Jacobson's ideas on wind power were widely attacked as too optimistic in Science magazine a few years ago by other pro-wind advocates, such as David Keith."
It sounds to me that you have a strong pro-nuke bias that you are defending.
You complain about no peer-reviewed data and I post some. So you then extend your argument to "peer review is sometimes wrong" and seemingly dismiss the offering.
A valid dismissal would involve pointing out flaws in the paper.
Further you attack Archer's and Jacobson's 2007 paper on the basis that Jacobson's ideas were attacked "years ago".
I smell a rat....
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:20 am
18 Dec 2008
Let's set a higher standard, please. Read the stuff presented and point out what you feel to be the weaknesses rather than dismissing it because it doesn't support your personal beliefs.
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:30 am
18 Dec 2008
And I could as easily say "Only the religious pro-nukes believe that nuclear power is cheap."
(And I think I would be the correct party in the exchange.)
----
"To produce 1 MW... 25 to 30%.
Why would nuclear be more expensive than wind ?"
You left out cost of capital, for one thing.
Here, please read - actually read - these two links and tell me where they get it wrong.
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/6/13/11021/6597
"But I agree with you on public opposition. Nuclear has a lot more opposition than wind. It is unfortunate, and has a lot to do with how fossil fuel interests have infiltrated green camps."
And I call blatant Bull Shit on that last sentence.
Surely even you don't believe that.
---
Do read the Lovins et al. paper linked above by Phil. Read it as an open-minded person looking for the best solution for our problems.
If you can find any quality rebuttals please link them. (Please no half-truth arguments such as the above cost analysis for nuclear which omits expenses that even the nuclear industry admits.)
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Bob Wallace Posted 4:09 am
18 Dec 2008
"Remember, peer means elite, not equals--some farmers tried to assert that farmers are peers of farmers and so could peer review one another's work."
Sorry, that's bogus. A peer is a person who is of equal standing with another in a group.
Within (probably all) branches of science there are "more respected" peers and "more respected" journals which have higher standards of publication.
In my field there are journals which one reads with feelings of trust and ones which are best read with strong skepticism goggles in place. But all are written and edited by peers.
Having grown up on a farm I can assure you that farmers are "peers" when it comes to things farming. Plumbers and dentists are not farming peers. Farmers don't ask roofers or investment bankers which variety of seeds works best in the local soil.
Of course, one learns which of your peers to trust and which to ignore....
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