Scientist a cheerleader with the energy to make a difference

WORLD OF SCIENCE - BY BOB BROCKIE

OPINION: On the campaign trail, United States President Barack Obama pledged to revamp the American energy sector.

Under George W Bush's regime, the energy sector lurched from crisis to crisis, overseen by ineffectual political and business appointees who included a dentist, an evangelist and the manager of a family coffee company.

The day after his appointment as president, Mr Obama swore in scientist Steven Chu as his new energy secretary, the first scientist to hold the position since the Cold War.

Dr Chu is a renowned physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for inventing a method for trapping and manipulating individual atoms (using lasers at near zero temperatures). His technique has proved useful in many scientific fields, including the manipulation of DNA units.

At the time of his appointment Dr Chu was a professor at the University of California and directed a leading national physics laboratory. Since 2004 he has been a cheerleader for more research into alternative energy, harnessing solar power, cleaner nuclear energy and the "climate puzzle".

In his new job at the Energy Department, Dr Chu oversees the US's energy supply, its nuclear stockpile and cleaning up after an earlier nuclear age. He manages a staff of 100,000, including thousands of scientists at 17 big labs.

Innovative clean energy research is too far from the market to attract industrial money. Dr Chu fills this gap by committing government scientists to high-risk blue-sky research devoted to greener renewable energy, modernising the electricity grid, finding ways to sequester carbon and promoting safer nuclear power.

He says a coal-fired power station produces 100 times more atomic radiation than a nuclear power plant.

As part of Mr Obama's "green cabinet", Dr Chu played a big hand in organising the recent Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. There, he spent a lot of time helping bridge the divide between the US and China. He also promised US$85 million (NZ$121m) for energy research in poorer countries.

Dr Chu has already put nearly US$7m into researching lithium ion batteries the size of shipping containers and put millions of dollars into researching novel absorbents that remove carbon from the environment.

With a budget of US$37 billion, Dr Chu is creating eight "energy innovation hubs" focusing on fuels from sunlight, the design energy-efficient buildings and fourth-generation nuclear power plants, advanced new materials for use in extreme temperatures in nuclear power plants, improved materials for transmitting power, smart sensors that direct energy more efficiently, and new solar techniques for making electricity.

Among his many suggestions is painting the roofs of all buildings and the tops of all roads white to reflect sunlight back into space and slow global warming.

He says the effect would be like taking every one of the world's cars off the roads for about 11 years.

Revamping the US's energy sector is one helluva job but Dr Chu, an innovative thinker, says "necessity is the mother of invention and climate change is the mother of all necessities".

Nature magazine has just voted Dr Chu World Scientist of the Year.

- © Fairfax NZ News