Obama's energy pick endorses nukes, clean coal
WASHINGTON--Energy Secretary nominee Steven Chu was greeted with warm approval from a congressional committee during his confirmation hearing Tuesday, at which he acknowledged the need to pursue nuclear and clean-coal energy but promoted energy efficiency as the best means of addressing the nation's energy challenges in the face of a dour economy.
"I feel very strongly what the American family does not want is to pay an increasing fraction of their budget on energy costs," Chu said before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "That we do the best we can on energy efficiency--that, in my mind, remains the lowest hanging fruit."
Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu, Obama's pick to be the next energy secretary, appeared before a congressional committee Tuesday.
(Credit: Stanford University)Working toward producing more efficient cars and tightly sealed homes will bring down energy consumption and costs, he said.
Committee Chair Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said Chu would be heading up the Energy Department at a "pivotal time in the department's history," noting that tens of billions of dollars in the upcoming stimulus package are likely to be devoted to energy programs.
He said that he would like the committee to vote on Chu's nomination later this week so the Nobel Prize-winning physicist could be confirmed as Energy Secretary by the entire senate on January 20, when President-elect Barack Obama takes office.
Chu would take responsibility of an increasingly important energy program at a time when funding will be sparse. Bingaman noted the lack of funding for a loan guarantee program set up by the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Chu said that he would be able to manage the department efficiently. Since becoming director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004, he has been primarily known as a scientist, he said, but "I spent three quarters of my time paying attention to the operation side of the house."
Part of the Energy Department's $25 billion budget should go toward accelerating the development of consumer-friendly batteries for electric hybrid cars, Chu said.
"These first electric hybrid cars don't have the energy capacity and the battery lifetime we need," he said. "Let's push hard towards more fuel-efficient personal vehicles."
While the senators present endorsed Chu's enthusiasm for developing new energy technologies, many emphasized the need to put funds toward readily available energy sources like nuclear power.
"Isn't it important we accelerate this proven source of clean energy?" Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Al.) asked with respect to nuclear power.
"I'm supportive of the fact that the nuclear industry should be part of the mix," Chu said.
He said federal loan guarantee programs should be used to jump-start the nuclear industry while the nation develops a long-term plan for safe disposal of waste and researches ways to recycle waste in an economically viable and safe manner.
"The recycling issue is something we don't need a solution for today, or even 10 years from today," Chu said. "It's like coal--one doesn't have a hard moratorium on that while we search for ways to capture carbon safely."
Chu said the United States, India, China, and Russia will not turn their backs to coal, so it is critical to find ways to use it as cleanly as possible, a sentiment many senators agreed with.
"All of us understand we need to use coal differently in the future," said Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.). "But I don't think anybody believes we're not going to use our most abundant resource."
Chu said the United States has an opportunity to develop clean-coal technologies for the rest of the world to use, and "if confirmed, I will work very hard to extensively develop these."
Stephanie Condon is a staff writer for CNET News focused on the intersection of technology and politics. She is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail Stephanie. 
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One thing that must also be considered is that if stop using coal than we would have an economic disaster. People in Appalachia depend on coal to make their living. Just imagine if they suddenly lost their job. Clean coal is a good idea because it keeps them employed.
Besides, I remember well how Obama supported nuclear and coal pre-election. What you should be worried about with Obama is why he surrounds himself with socialists like his new climate czar.
One thing that must also be considered is that if stop using coal than we would have an economic disaster. People in Appalachia depend on coal to make their living. Just imagine if they suddenly lost their job. Clean coal is a good idea because it keeps them employed.
Pop quiz: how many people have died in the US due to nuclear power? Answer: 0, none, nada, nil, zilch. Pop quiz: how much nuclear waste does a modern reactor produce per year? Answer: 3 cubic meters after the standard reprocessing. All the fears of nuclear power are based on ignorance and lies.
The figure is for top-end solar-to-power energy is at 17% conversion efficiency, not 11%. You can get 30%+ in a lab, but manufacturing won't catch up to that for a very long time.
That said, anything not hydro or wind really isn't all that much better - It takes oil to transport oil to the end-user (burned on tankers, trains, and/or delivery trucks, burned to eventually power oil drills and pumps, burned to fuel the oil refineries, etc etc). Natural Gas requires steam reforming. Biofuels require fertilizer, transport, and a LOT of handling. Coal requires mining, transport, cleaning post-combustion, etc.
Nuclear has a solid chance of being the best at conversion, but there's a couple of problems. Nope, nothing to do with waste or radiation - those can be fixed. The problem is that we don't really have too awful much uranium to go around, and processing it is beastly in terms of the amount of power used to refine it to a useful percentage. Breeder reactors help ameliorate that, but only barely. There's also teh horrendous construction costs and regulatory obstacles (albeit necessary ones to prevent, say, another Chernobyl...)
Out of the whole wad, hydro and wind are the most efficient, followed by solar. - These take a bit of initial investment, but once in place, operate with little maintenance (in solar's case, pretty much none since there's usually no moving parts involved until you add things like optional tracker motors), and aside from availability of moving water, air, or sunlight (the big problem that each of these methods have), they are the most efficient means of gathering electricity in the long run.
All of this said, there is no one-size solution. There also is no superior solution... but a combination of them together can certainly make one hell of a dent in the fossil fuel aspect of things...
Aren't the words - "Hydro-Electricity Generation" in your vocabulary!
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Kashiwazaki earthquake, and the radioactive waste.
Nuclear is safe even with the old technology, with new technolgy it can be made a few orders of magnitude safer. But people fear what they don't understand, which is a reasonable reaction, but not a good one.
The transmission system is a disaster waiting to happen.
There have been a couple of small scale events, that should have got some alarm bells ringing. However I fear it will need a good size disaster to get action. Too late as usual.
Note that transmission gets very little attention, it's all , lets have wind,wave,solar,coal as the generator .
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Kashiwazaki earthquake, and the radioactive waste.
Nuclear plants have advanced quite a bit. Take a look at Canada's reactors - and they're OLD.
- by NewEnglandMOM January 24, 2009 5:15 PM PST
- Glad to see that there are more that comment on NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL... with all the water wasted collecting the coal, the black lung and the mining deaths it is not the right thing for my family- of yah and the CO2 when it is burned. Lets be honest "all the jobs" clean coal can make- we are in the technology age more and more machines are going to mine for coal- so what job will that create???
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