President-elect Barack Obama’s announcement Monday that he will nominate Nobel laureate Steven Chu to become the nation’s next energy secretary is welcome news on at least two fronts.
One is that Chu is a scientist who Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is convinced shares Obama’s opposition to a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada. Another reason to be enthused about Chu is that with him at the helm, this country can expect more aggressive development and use of environmentally friendly renewable energy resources.
Chu, a physicist who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for discovering how to cool and trap atoms and molecules with lasers, is intimately familiar with the Energy Department that he would run. As director of the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Chu called for increased research involving solar energy and biofuels in an effort to reduce the greenhouse gases that have led to global warming.
The New York Times wrote in a Dec. 5 profile of Chu that he “has spoken unenthusiastically” about the proposal for a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
“He has shown that he can work beyond the confines of a national lab to tackle real-world issues and his expertise will greatly benefit our country,” Reid said of Chu. “Dr. Chu also knows, like most Nevadans, that Yucca Mountain is not a viable solution for dumping and dealing with nuclear waste.”
Reid’s backing is critical because he had said he would not allow the Senate to approve the nomination of an energy secretary who supported a Yucca Mountain dump.
It will be refreshing to have a scientist of Chu’s stature in Obama’s Cabinet. The Bush administration too often treated scientists as second-class citizens and tainted reasonable scientific recommendations with a destructive political agenda that promoted development of fossil fuels and other policies that harmed the environment. That is not likely to be the case with Obama.
Source: Las Vegas Sun
