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As Obama's Energy Chief, Steven Chu Likely to Shift Agency's Focus to Renewables

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Dear Mr. Secretary of Energy,Steven Chu,
Please hear our cry. Make a stiff and binding agreement on energy change at the world meeting in Copenhagen in December, 2009. We depend on you to do what we need for life on our planet needs.
We live in dirty air every day---Stockton, California
Thank you, deeply, Eve Pecchenino

EVE AND PAUL PECCHENINO of CA 3:20PM October 25, 2009

Dr. Chu is brilliant and a wise choice for this all important role in addressing our energy needs current and future. I will applaud all efforts to move us of foreign oil dependancy once and for all and that will require a multi-pronged approach.
Basically it will take solar, hydro, etc the one area that we should run from is NUCLEAR as there is NO safe way of storing nuclear waste and nobody wants to deal with this nasty stuff.
My firm supports reducing our existing consumtpion of energy through widespread commercial use of LED lighting which we manufacture and sell. This is not brain surgery and the ROI is attractive as we are moving this technology daily because it does pencil out for business ownersd when you factor the constant rate increases from PUC's all across the country.
If we truly are committed to making an impact on the GHG emmissions from PUC's, Dr. Chu would be wise to spend big money in the promotion of a technology that is in existance now and can be a rapid game changer for years to come and that is LED.
Clean Light Green Light supports this technology, as we feel it is the safest and quickest path to curbing our energy consumption.

Tom Meyer of MI 10:15AM June 25, 2009

Hi guys. The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
I am from Tonga and also now teach English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "If you would rather not subscribe, you can download individual episodes of this podcast to your computer."
Thank you so much for your future answers :-). Eloise.

Eloise of OR 6:59PM February 22, 2009

How are you. The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
I am from Niger and also now am reading in English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "The female breast is drawn differently depending on shape, environment, and perspective."
Thank :) Audrey.

Audrey of WA 6:58PM February 22, 2009

The answer to the world's energy challenges can be found by simply looking up!!! The Sun is powered by Hydrogen the most abudant element in our universe and is found in every organic entity in existence. Our challenge is to exploit this energy source to our advantage. We can begin by expanding our hydrogen pipelines which now feed industry by adding hydrogen fueling stations for the public thus allowing for hydrogen fuel cell automobiles to address our economic, environmental and security challenges. Hydrogen fuel cells have limitless applications as they are merely refuelable energy sources supplying clean electricity for any application thus allowing for limitless investment opportunities. Because every application of hydrogen is zero-emission it will naturally replace greenhouse gas and polluting mechanisms in all areas of industry and daily life. By producing hydrogen from domestic sources funding to terror supporting regions will be cut and eventually stopped reducing the threats to the world. Nothing worthwhile ever occurs easily and the hydrogen economy is not possible without planning and effort yet the rewards are endless. So for a practicle energy solution we must simply look up!!!

Ray Fisher of NM 9:47AM February 04, 2009

E F Schumacher had the right idea of economics, including energy supply, as if people mattered. Centralised power stations burn valuable natural resources and leave waste, most seriously radioactivity, for future generations, with unnecessary risks to their survival.
Nuclear power has become a chronicly subsidised vested interest that began with utopian promises and has ended as deadly threats of proliferation and diffusion.
There is also huge waste in centralised energy transmission as well as electo-magnetic pollution thereby.
It is ludicrous to pretend that human ingenuity cannot develop
user-friendly renewable energies. Over fifty years ago, the energy report, to President Eisenhower, futilely urged an aggressive research in solar power as of tremendous potential benefit to mankind. The report down-played fission energy.
Thorium power, I believe, is too little help too late. Fusion power eventually should be the good bet that fission turned out not to be.
There are many clever ideas one keeps hearing about and presumably many more we dont hear about. It is high time that real money was put into research towards the energy self-sufficient home and like projects that can lower the cost of living for ordinary people and which will certainly have a great market.

Richard Lung 5:13PM January 12, 2009

Amory B. Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist, is a consultant experimental physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford. He has received an Oxford MA (by virtue of being a don), ten honorary doctorates, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Blue Planet, Volvo, Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood ("Alternative Nobel"), World Technology, and Time Hero for the Planet awards, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, and the Nissan, Shingo, Mitchell, Jean Meyer, and Onassis Prizes. He is an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Honorary Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. He has lately led the redesign of over $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors for radical energy and resource efficiency. He has briefed nineteen heads of state, held several visiting academic chairs (most recently the 2007 MAP/Ming Professorship at Stanford), written twenty-nine books and hundreds of papers, and consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. The Wall Street Journal named Mr. Lovins one of thirty-nine people worldwide "most likely to change the course of business in the '90s"; Newsweek has praised him as "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers"; and Car magazine ranked him the twenty-second most powerful person in the global automotive industry.
Amory Lovins offers advice to anticipated Secretary of Energy appointee Dr. Steven Chu
SNOWMASS, COLO. DECEMBER 15, 2008 – Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute, hailed the reported appointment of Dr. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, and offered this advice to the incoming Department of Energy leadership:
“Get the nuclear weapons and nuclear cleanup missions out of DOE into other civilian agencies, so we finally have an open, unclassified DOE focused exclusively on its civilian energy mission.”
“Separate Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: they must be closely coordinated but merit separate Assistant Secretaries and budgets.”
 “Combine the divisions that promote fission and fusion. They won't be getting much money anyway if we choose the best buys first and focus on technologies headed for deployment in competitive markets.”
 “Remember that DOE has two statutory duties: technology research (nearly all its activities) and public-policy development (mostly neglected)”
 “Public policy should emphasize barrier-busting -- turning into a business opportunity, or otherwise correcting, each of the 60-80 well-known market failures to buying energy efficiency (and distributed and renewable supplies). Otherwise little will happen even if we get energy prices right.”
 “Name and shame energy subsidies. Desubsidizing the whole energy sector, so we pay for our energy at the meter or pump, not through our taxes, would be immensely helpful to our prosperity, security, and environment.”
“Name and shame energy subsidies. Desubsidizing the whole energy sector, so we pay for our energy at the meter or pump, not through our taxes, would be immensely helpful to our prosperity, security, and environment.”
 “As the core principles of energy policy, seek to allow and require all ways to save or produce energy to compete fairly, at honest prices, regardless of which kind they are, what technology they use, how big they are, where they are, or who owns them. Who wouldn't be in favor of that?”
“Be bold. This is our last and best chance to get energy right. We know how; we just need to go do it.”

Yosef Jacobs 2:09PM December 21, 2008

This guy is blinded by Biofuel.
Biofuels are not worth the energy they consume in manufacturing.
Looks like Obama is in bed with BIG OIL after all...and it's not even an American Big OPil company...oh no.

Ticker Shuffle of PA 10:37AM December 20, 2008

As construction continues on a new sarcophagus for reactor number 4 in Chernobyl, I'm still at a loss for the giddiness over nuclear energy. So, we're supposed to consider it an evolutionary leap in logical thought to go from a dependence on foreign fuel to a dependence on nuclear energy, which last time I checked is still rife with a plethora of niggling concerns, such as, oh, where do we throw the waste?! As for gifting the developing world with this godsend, which hotspot would you like to see irradiated first? A true hotspot indeed.
Fantastic if there are safer alternatives to what is currently in use, but it's still troublesome to have X percentile of fission products to deal with when we're talking a high annual production rate at n number of reactors. And 300 years( and on and on and on with annual production) is still a long time, even for hobbits.

Brion of PA 3:27AM December 20, 2008

We cannot continue to improve the condition of people throughout the word without use of nuclear power. None of the renewable energy solutions can be scaled quickly enough to meet the current and future energy needs of the world’s poor. Increasingly expensive energy does more harm to people close to the poverty line than to people that are wealthy. Energy takes a higher proportion of the incomes of people who are poor. Wealthy people can more easily pay the costs of expensive energy. Alternative Energy solutions are boutique energy experiments for the wealthy developed world that are just too expensive for the requirements of the developing world. Safer, proliferation resistant, nuclear power without long term high level waste storage problems is needed to power a growing world economy and to allow all nations to provide for and feed their growing populations in peace. These goals are achieved by changing the nuclear fuel cycle to a Uranium-233/Thorium fuel cycle.
Uranium-233/Thorium nuclear fuel cycle as implemented in Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors answer the two most common primary objections to wider application of nuclear power.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors:
• Provide a proliferation-resistant fuel cycle — no production of nuclear weapons-usable materials in spent fuel.
• Eliminate the need for long term storage of high level nuclear waste at facilities like Yucca Mountain by significantly reducing the volume, weight and long-term radio-toxicity of spent fuel [1]. Uranium-233 produced in Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors is a fuel that can be completely burned while producing energy leaving only fission products. The longest lived fission products produced by Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors decay to benign levels of the radioactive natural background within 300 years and the majority (83%) of fission products of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors decay to natural background in 10 years. The nuclear fuel efficiency of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors is in excess of 98% while traditional Uranium-Plutonium cycle LWR used to commercially make electricity in the US only have a fuel efficiency of 2 to 3%.
Safer, proliferation resistant, buildable nuclear power without nuclear proliferation and the long term high level waste storage problems is available from Thorium Fuel cycle solutions implemented in Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. DOE Secretary Steven Chu should take responsible steps to lead in initiating a transition from Uranium-Plutonium fuel cycle technology which was developed to meet the combined needs of weapons and power generation to Thorium Fuel Cycle technology which is only well suited to generate abundant electrical power.

Robert Steinhaus - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Retired) of CA 10:37PM December 19, 2008