John Holdren, science advisor to President Barack Obama, swung by Blighty today for some tea and crumpets with the Brits. But before embarking on a who’s who tour of UK science policymakers, he joined the press in the basement of the US embassy for some all-American cookies and black coffee.
Most of his hour-long round table was spent discussing climate change. He expressed some disappointment with the climate change legislation winding its way through the US Congress, but sees it as a make-or-break step for getting an effective international accord out of the UN’s Copenhagen conference, which will take place in December. Some of the reporters expressed scepticism that a bill could be passed in time, but Holdren was optimistic, noting that the administration only needed around 12-15 additional votes in the Senate to pass the legislation. “I would still bet that it will happen, but I have to admit that it’s going to be a challenge,” he said.
Holdren believes a big part of the solution to climate change will come from nuclear energy. He reiterated his longstanding support of that technology, but poo-pooed commercial reprocessing of old nuclear fuel, an approach advocated by previous president George W. Bush (but not by Nature). He also dismissed the US’s deeply-troubled nuclear waste disposal site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, advocating instead for a number of regional interim storage facilities. Such facilities, he notes, would get the current waste off the sites of commercial power plants, while minimizing the distance it will have to travel. There’s a good political reason for regional sites as well—it won’t force the US to choose a single location for waste disposal, something that’s difficult in the highly decentralized federal system.
Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Holdren reiterated his belief in a coordinated international approach for supplying nuclear fuel. “I would personally like to see uranium enrichment around the world put under international management,” he said. Putting enrichment under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, would discourage nations from developing dual-use enrichment capabilities that could be used for nuclear weapons. Holdren pointed out that the Obama administration has yet to take any firm stand on the issue.
None of these positions are really new, but it was good to hear them from the horse’s mouth.
By the way, I’ve decided that the US and UK are in some sort of twisted competition to see who can have the ugliest embassy in the other nation’s capital. I’ve now visited both buildings, and they’re absolutely hideous.
Image: Harvard University