Obama nominates Moniz for energy, McCarthy for EPA

Posted on 04 Mar 2013 by Jeff Tollefson

Ernest Moniz and Gina McCarthy {credit}MIT; EPA{/credit}

US President Barack Obama moved to fill a pair of key posts in his energy and environmental team on Monday. Confirming weeks of speculation, the president nominated Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist Ernest Moniz as secretary of energy while promoting Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

During a brief announcement at the White House, Obama cited Moniz’s experience at the department under former president Bill Clinton, as well as his expertise on energy and climate issues. “Most importantly,” the president said, “Ernie knows that we can produce more energy and grow our economy while still taking care of our air, our water and our climate.”

As discussed in our pages last week (‘Physicist tipped for US energy post‘), Moniz will replace Nobel Laureate Steven Chu, who oversaw a massive one-time boost in spending on clean energy while advancing new interdisciplinary research and development initiatives within the department. Moniz has promoted the same kind of holistic thinking on energy issues at MIT and has extensive experience on nuclear weapons and nonproliferation issues.

“President Obama could not have made a better choice from the point of view of energy policy, advancing a wide range of energy technology, and stewardship of nuclear weapons, ” John Deutch, a chemist and colleague at MIT who also served in the Clinton administration, wrote in an e-mail to Nature.

Operating directly under Lisa Jackson, McCarthy has spearheaded the efforts on air quality and greenhouse gases as assistant EPA administrator for air and radiation. That experience will come in particularly handy if Obama follows through on his promise to advance climate regulations in the face of congressional gridlock on the issue (‘Obama rekindles climate hopes‘). Before going to work for the EPA, McCarthy served as commissioner of the Connecticut department of environmental protection, where she worked on the northeastern states’ regional greenhouse-gas trading initiative. She also served as a long-time environmental regulator in Massachusetts, including under former Republican governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Both candidates have fairly broad support. Although Moniz has faced opposition among some environmental groups for his endorsement of natural gas as a short-term vehicle for reducing US emissions, he is not expected to encounter any major hurdles during the senate confirmation process. Obama said McCarthy has “earned a reputation as a straight shooter”, and environmentalists roundly lauded her appointment. But her confirmation hearings are nonetheless likely to be explosive as Republicans target the White House’s regulatory agenda.

During her initial confirmation hearings in 2009, McCarthy encountered opposition from Wyoming Republican John Barrasso, who accused the EPA of “gambling with the American people’s future” by setting in motion the machinery to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Barrasso eventually relented, but he will have more ammunition this time around.

External review reaffirms hurdles for nuclear-fusion superlaser

Posted on 06 Feb 2013 by Geoffrey Brumfiel

A technician at the National Ignition Facility inspects the laser's target {credit}LLNL/NIF{/credit}

Last autumn, the world’s most powerful laser missed a major milestone in its drive to produce thermonuclear fusion. Now, the findings of an independent peer-review panel lay out in detail why achieving that goal is turning out to be so difficult.

The US$3.5-billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, is designed to crush tiny pellets of hydrogen isotopes until they fuse into helium. The goal is to release more energy than goes into the pellet and, in doing so, to roughly mimic conditions inside a modern nuclear warhead.

That was the goal, but a six-year “ignition campaign” came up short in September, sparking introspection among scientists, federal officials and congressional funders. Introspection in Washington inevitably leads to reports, and in November and December, a series of reviews of the project were released — including plans to shift the giant laser facility away from ignition work and towards weapons.

Now, a peer review of the project has been made public by the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the government body that oversees the NIF. That review, by independent scientists, is the last in a series convened by Steven Koonin, former undersecretary of science at the US Department of Energy.

The new review doesn’t differ too much from previous ones, but it does provide a pithy summary of some of the problems. In particular, it notes that scientists at the NIF have had trouble controlling the symmetry of their laser-driven implosion, and the ways in which hot and cold fuels mix together. The committee also noted that computer codes just aren’t good enough.

Perhaps more interestingly, the committee seemed to be split over whether ignition would actually ever be achievable. “Some reviewers were optimistic while others remain highly skeptical as regards for the prospects of future ignition,” the report says.

Steven Chu to step down from energy post

Posted on 01 Feb 2013 by Richard Monastersky

Steven Chu{credit}DOE{/credit}

Steven Chu announced today that he will soon step down as head of the US energy department, a move that had been widely anticipated. Nature this week previewed some of the potential replacements for Chu and other members of US President Barack Obama’s environmental team.

In his letter to energy department employees, Chu highlighted a string of accomplishments, including starting the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), founding Energy Innovation Hubs for applied research and overseeing a doubling in the country’s production of solar and wind energy.

Nature recognized Chu as its newsmaker of the year in 2009 for his role in revamping America’s energy research and power systems. He played an important part in helping to stem the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but he also faced strong criticism from foes in Congress, particularly over a US$535-million loan guarantee that his department made to the solar-cell manufacturing firm, Solyndra, which entered bankruptcy in 2011.

In his letter today, Chu told employees that he and his wife will return to California and he would like to resume teaching and research.

Obama’s environmental team makes for the exit

Posted on 18 Jan 2013 by Jeff Tollefson

Rumours of US energy secretary Steven Chu’s imminent departure, swirling for weeks, picked up again on Thursday. If confirmed, the Nobel laureate’s departure would very nearly complete the list of resignations by members of President Barack Obama’s vaunted environment team.

The resignations, common as presidents move into their second terms, began on 12 December, when marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco announced that she was leaving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; next came US Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, on 27 December. US Geological Survey director Marcia McNutt announced her resignation last week, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced his on Wednesday.

Featured as Nature‘s Newsmaker of the Year in 2009, Chu led the energy department through a remarkable period, overseeing US$37-billion economic stimulus spending on clean energy and technology in the wake of the financial crisis. Although generally popular, Chu came under fierce criticism by Republican lawmakers after the department invested $535 million in a solar manufacturer that ultimately went bankrupt.

A physicist by training, Chu previously headed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where he took an interest in the global energy dilemma. After coming to Washington, he worked to overhaul the way the department conducts and funds energy research, promoting the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy for high-risk science as well as a series of interdisciplinary Energy Innovation Hubs.

Chu’s departure would whittle Obama’s ‘science dream team‘ down to two, leaving John Holdren as the White House science adviser and geneticist Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Despite the lack of a formal statement from Chu, Washington has been buzzing with speculation about potential candidates since November. The long list includes former senator Byron Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, and deputy-defence secretary Ashton Carter as well as Dan Reicher, a Stanford University professor and former energy department official who previously headed energy and climate ventures for Google.

Draft US climate assessment released for review

Posted on 11 Jan 2013 by Jeff Tollefson

A US science advisory committee released a draft climate assessment for public review today, documenting a range of global-warming impacts across the United States and declaring that more trouble is on the way in the coming decades.

Produced under the auspices of the interagency Global Change Research Program, the draft document will serve as the basis for the United States’ third national climate assessment, scheduled for release later this year or in early 2014. The previous assessments were released in 2000 and 2009.

Coming just days after news that the United States experienced its hottest year on record in 2012, the draft report says that average US temperatures have increased by more than 0.8° Celsius since 1895, with a sharp spike since 1980. It also provides an update on the litany of impacts being analysed by scientists. There is “strong evidence” that global warming has roughly doubled the likelihood of extreme heat events, contributing to droughts and wildfires, according to the report. Permafrost is melting in Alaska, and much of the country is experiencing more extreme rainfall and winter snowstorms.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” leaders of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee said in a letter accompanying the document. Environmentalists immediately said the report underscores the need for action, but it will also attract scrutiny from sceptics in the days ahead.

Looking forward, the assessment centres on impacts that can be expected under a pair of emissions scenarios for the twenty-first century, assuming both high and low levels of greenhouse-gas emissions. Under these scenarios, which were among those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fourth assessment in 2007, average temperatures across the United States could rise by roughly 1.7–5.6° C by the end of the century. (The actual increase will depend on global emissions going forward, however, and so far the world is tracking above even the high-emissions scenario.) Individual chapters focus on everything from forestry and water resources to public health. The advisory committee also provided independent assessments for different regions of the country and sectors of the economy while documenting efforts to reduce emissions and prepare for the coming changes.

Akin to the IPCC assessments, the document does not present new evidence but instead assembles and assesses scientific studies that were published or in press as of 31 July 2012. More than 240 academics, consultants, business representatives and other experts took part in the draft released today; the document will be available for public comment between 14 January and 12 April.

UK energy deal boosts renewables – but hesitates on low-carbon electricity

Posted on 23 Nov 2012 by Richard Van Noorden

The UK government last night said that its energy and finance ministries had struck a deal to triple the amount firms can add to customer bills by 2020, in order to support nuclear, wind, solar and other sources of low-carbon electricity.

The agreement (held up for months by discord in the ruling two-party political coalition) sets the country on course to supply 30% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, up from 11% today — providing some certainty to the renewables industry, which has complained about a lack of long-term support. Much of the electricity will come from wind energy.

The full energy bill will not be released until next week, but it already seems that the British government doesn’t want to think too long term. Last night’s deal also saw politicians bail out of a proposed bill to cut carbon emissions almost entirely from the electricity sector by 2030. That kind of measure would rule out most new gas power stations — on the other hand, according to the UK committee on climate change, an independent advisory body, it’s also needed if the country is to meet the legally binding targets it has set to cut emissions 80% (below 1990 levels) by 2050.

Continue reading →

Greenhouses gases at new high as UN climate talks resume

Posted on 20 Nov 2012 by Quirin Schiermeier

The concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere climbed to a record high in 2011, according to the latest analysis of observations from the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch programme.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) — the single most important greenhouse gas — reached 390.9 parts per million (p.p.m.) in 2011 and is now 40% above the pre-industrial level of 280 p.p.m., the WMO reports today in its Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. Methane (1,813 parts per billion) and nitrous oxide (324 parts per billion) — both potent greenhouse gases — also reached new highs last year.

From 1990 to 2011, radiative forcing by long-lived greenhouse gases has increased by almost one-third, with CO₂ alone accounting for about 80% of this increase. Since the start of the industrial era in 1750, about 1,377 billion tonnes of CO₂ have been released into the atmosphere, according to the report.

About one half of that amount may have been absorbed by the ocean and by soils and plants on land. The other half lingers in the atmosphere, causing temperatures near the surface to warm.

The WMO bulletin reports on atmospheric concentrations — not emissions — of greenhouse gases. Emissions of CO₂ from fossil-fuel burning and cement production increased by 3% in 2011, reaching an all-time high of around 34 billion tonnes.

Concentrations represent what remains in the atmosphere after the complex system of interactions between the atmosphere, terrestrial biosphere and the oceans.

If the ocean’s capacity for taking up CO₂ and sequestering carbon were to decline, which scientists fear might happen, the global carbon sink could become substantially less efficient in the future.

With unstopped emission growth, the world is now on a dangerous path towards 4 °C global warming by the end of this century, the World Bank warned in a report released yesterday.

United Nations climate talks will resume next week in Doha, Qatar, where nations will negotiate the future of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.

Seismic study loses air over wildlife concerns

Posted on 15 Nov 2012 by Helen Shen

Bruce Gibson argues for the use state-of-the-art seismic survey techniques.{credit}screenshot from California Coastal Commission live webcast{/credit}

A California regulatory board on 14 November denied a key permit for a proposed study of under-sea faults near the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County. The plant’s owners, San Francisco–based Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), had designed the project to aid the state in re-evaluating earthquake risks to California’s two nuclear facilities following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in March 2011.

The California Coastal Commission reached a unanimous decision after hearing hours of testimony from PG&E, interest groups and concerned citizens. Environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), based in New York City, argued that marine wildlife would be harmed by the use of high-energy seismic reflection — a technique that maps geological structures in three dimensions by shooting intense sound waves into the ocean and measuring their echoes off of geological features beneath the sea floor. The sound blasts, which measure 230–252 decibels at the air gun source, can penetrate 10–15 kilometres into the Earth.

In its own staff report, the California Coastal Commission estimated that more than 7,000 marine mammals — including several whale species, harbour porpoises and sea otters — would be disrupted by the study. “There will be impacts,” acknowledged Mark Krause, director of state agency relations for PG&E. “We believe we’ve mitigated them to the degree feasible.” In recent months, the company had revised the proposal to reduce the survey area and included additional wildlife monitoring efforts.

PG&E has argued that high-energy testing could provide the most detailed maps yet of a complex network of offshore faults near the plant, including the Hosgri Fault, which lies about three miles to the west. But the commission remained unconvinced that the possible benefits of the project outweighed the costs.

“We know that there is potential for very significant marine resource impacts here,” said Charles Lester, the commission’s executive director. “We don’t feel the case has been made that this particular test at this time is needed.”

The commission urged the company to finish analysing other seismic data it has collected using onshore and low-energy offshore techniques in recent years — data that many opponents say could obviate the high-energy tests.

Still, other critics, such as Bruce Gibson, a former geophysicist and a current county supervisor in San Luis Obispo, want to see the high-energy studies carried out but using more sophisticated technology that might collect data faster and with less environmental disruption.

If the company decides to submit a revised plan, it may still need to convince commissioners that the information gleaned from high-energy seismic tests would have practical value.

In her closing comments, commissioner Jana Zimmer questioned whether more detailed maps of the surrounding faults could be used to improve the safety of the plant, which is currently designed to withstand a 7.5-magnitude quake.

“If we assume that there is a possibility of a disastrous quake — an 8.5 or 9.0 quake — are there design fixes, are there technologies that we know about that are available… that it would be able to withstand such a quake?” She said that she hasn’t received a satisfactory answer from the company.

Even if not for safety considerations, some scientists saw the project as an opportunity to collect crucial information about tectonic interactions between the Pacific and North American plates, which create lateral motion along several ‘strike-slip’ faults in the region.

“Strike-slip systems are not straight lines on a map and in 3D they’re not simple planes. To understand their complexity they need to be imaged, and this is an opportunity to image one in great detail,” Art Lerner-Lam, deputy director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, New York, told Nature.

PG&E had hoped to enlist scientists from the observatory to conduct the seismic research using the National Science Foundation–owned research vessel Marcus G. Langseth. If chosen, the scientists would have made the project data publicly available.

Bosch quits Desertec

Posted on 13 Nov 2012 by Quirin Schiermeier

The world’s most ambitious renewable energy project suffered another blow yesterday when the Germany technology supplier Bosch announced it was pulling out of the DESERTEC solar project. Stuttgart-based Bosch, the world’s biggest supplier of car parts, said it will quit the Desertec Industrial Initiative (Dii) by the end of the year.

“The economic conditions [do] not allow a continuation of its membership,” Reuters quotes a Bosch spokeswoman as saying.

The decision comes just two weeks after Siemens had announced its exit from the consortium. Siemens, based in Munich, Germany, said last month it will pull out from the loss-making solar business altogether

The DESERTEC initiative was launched in 2009 with the goal of building a network of solar plants across North Africa. Backers of the project hope that by mid-century DESERTEC will supply the region and large parts of Europe with more than 125 gigawatts of electricity.

But the €400 billion project has been criticised for being too risky and expensive. Last week, Spain delayed signing an agreement that would have allowed Dii to move ahead with building a first €600 million 150-megawatt solar plant in Morocco.

Dii’s chief executive Paul van Son said previously that the exit of single partners does not jeopardize the project. Dii’s shareholders do still include, among others, the German reinsurance company Munich Re, German power utilities E.ON and RWE, Deutsche Bank and the Italian-based UniCredit group. Meanwhile, the Chinese power company State Grid Corp (SGCC) is considering joining the project.

IEA calls for focus on energy efficiency

Posted on 12 Nov 2012 by Richard Van Noorden

The International Energy Agency (IEA) today implored policy-makers to focus on energy efficiency measures, to buy a little time before the world resigns itself to global warming of more than 2 °C.

Presenting the agency’s 2012 World Energy Outlook in London, the IEA’s chief economist Fatih Birol told reporters that he could see a “growing momentum in many countries to push the energy efficiency button”, but also that energy efficiency remained an “epic failure” in most nations’ energy policies. “The chances are slimmer and slimmer of avoiding a 2 °C rise,” he said. The IEA likes to talk about the time when existing factories, buildings and cars will ‘lock in’ greenhouse gas emissions that will push atmospheric carbon dioxide above 450 parts per million, the target thought to give an even chance of limiting global warming to 2 °C. Last year, it projected that time would come by 2017. Today, the agency said that energy efficiency measures could push the lock-in date out five years to 2022.

Each year the World Energy Outlook is a mixture of pragmatism and idealism. In solely pragmatic terms, the world’s energy demand will rise by a third to 2035, mainly driven by newly affluent consumers in China, India and the Middle East, the IEA projects. “The centre of gravity in global energy use is shifting to the East,” said Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA’s executive director. Yet by adopting measures such as fuel-economy standards, new building codes and requirements for more efficient power plants, by 2035 the world could halve that projected increase. These measures are all economically justified, Birol added: they would pay back more than they cost.

Asked why nations were not concentrating on energy efficiency, Birol said it was because governments were not sufficiently organized to push these policies. Energy ministries were often left to tackle the problem alone; but they needed to work together with policy-makers in the areas of finance, construction, industry and transport, he said. “Climate change is slipping down the agenda, and the costs of inaction are rising,” he added. Continue reading →

nature.com blogs

Category Archives: Energy