Analysis: Next energy chief to take agency back to its roots
Timothy Gardner, Reuters
January 9, 2013

 

(Reuters) - The next head of the Department of Energy is likely to guide the agency through a fundamental shift: easing up on a push to commercialize renewable energy and instead focusing on the surprising domestic oil and gas boom and management of U.S. nuclear security.

 

President Barack Obama is widely believed to be considering candidates to replace Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winning physicist who managed an ill-fated $40-billion effort to promote the green economy with loans and grants to solar, wind and biofuel companies.

The program, part of the 2009 economic stimulus bill, suffered a public relations nightmare when solar panel maker Solyndra and battery manufacturer A123 declared bankruptcy last year after receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. backed financial assistance.

 

"The four years under Chu were the least typical of the entire DOE," said Paul Bledsoe, an independent energy consultant. The agency was formed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 in response to high oil prices after the Arab oil embargo.

 

"They had this huge amount of money to push out the door, which became not only a priority but a challenge to spend wisely," said Bledsoe, a former White House aide to Bill Clinton.

 

The focus at the DOE in the years ahead is likely to return to where about two-thirds of its budget goes: security of nuclear weapons, reactors and waste.

 

"DOE policy is going back to a business-as-usual situation where, essentially, military nuclear spending tail-wags the energy policy dog," said Robert Alvarez, of the Institute for Policy Studies who was a senior DOE official in the 1990s.

 

The agency's renewable energy initiatives will permanently move back to research and development and away from commercialization, said Bledsoe.

 

NAMES BEING SHOPPED

 

DOE sources and analysts at think tanks in Washington said an announcement from Chu to step down could come any day, with a replacement to be named within weeks, possibly after the January 21 inauguration.

 

The administration would not officially comment on whether Chu will step down. None of the potential candidates for the job commented either.

Two of those thought to be on the short-list have deep experience on nuclear issues.

 

Christine Gregoire, the outgoing governor of Washington state, has had a long career working with the federal government to clean up the nuclear waste mess at the federal Hanford Site in her state.

 

Ashton Carter, the deputy secretary of defense, led a program to dismantle thousands of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. Carter's experience managing money and annual procurement at the Pentagon could also make him a strong candidate, said David Goldwyn, who led international energy affairs at both the State Department and the DOE.

 

Former politicians, though, could be better suited for the position because they could better handle calls from members of Congress to hack away at the DOE budget, some analysts contend.

 

"The primary job of the secretary is to protect the DOE's core budget in the face of Congress. This is an area where a politician might do the job best," Goldwyn said.

 

Byron Dorgan, the former senator of North Dakota, could be another good choice, said Charles Ebinger, the director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

 

Dorgan once chaired the Senate energy and natural resources committee and is now a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank peppered with former lawmakers.

 

Other politicians mentioned include former Colorado governor Bill Ritter, who helped reform regulations on oil and gas in his state. Ritter now advocates for responsible oil and gas drilling from a post at Colorado State University.

 

Susan Tierney, a former assistant secretary for policy at the DOE, has also been mentioned as a candidate, although she withdrew from the running for deputy energy secretary in 2009.

 

OIL AND GAS EXPERIENCE A PLUS

 

Chu, who joined the department in 2009, had next to no experience dealing with the oil and natural gas industry and was tagged by critics as a symbol of the Obama administration's efforts to move away from petroleum.

 

But the remarkable boom in domestic oil and gas production over the last few years has made that lack of experience - not just from Chu but from some of his top deputies - a liability, experts said.

 

"It's singularly ridiculous, quite honestly, that you could go several people down into the DOE's leadership before you actually ran into somebody who knew anything about oil and gas," said Ebinger.

 

The boom has reduced U.S. oil imports and led to serious discussions about whether the country should export its bounty of crude and natural gas. The next DOE leader may have a role in promoting those exports, which could boost the U.S. economy.

 

Dorgan, whose state is home to the giant Bakken shale oil field, or Ritter, whose state is also experiencing a drilling boom, could be good at balancing the department's several tasks, analysts said.

 

In the next year the DOE also may start to make decisions on which facilities are given LNG export licenses out of a long list of applicants.

 

The secretary could also push for ways to get newfound domestic oil and gas to market, as thousands of miles of pipelines may have to be built. Many of the pipeline decisions could fall to other agencies, though, such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

 

But as a cabinet member, the new energy secretary could play an important role in articulating the importance of building such infrastructure to the American people.

 

"If the administration wants this to happen it has to be out there fighting for it," said Ebinger.

 

Red Wing: Indian community presses for nuclear waste storage solution
Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, Pioneer Press
January 7, 2013

 

It is 30 years and counting for the Prairie Island Indian Community, which says it continues to wait for the federal government to find a permanent home for the nuclear waste piling up outside the Prairie Island nuclear power plant next door.

 

The Prairie Island Indian Community, located near Red Wing, marked the 30-year anniversary Monday, Jan. 7, of the law that mandated the creation of a national storage facility for all the nation's nuclear waste.

 

The Indian community urged the public in full-page newspaper ads in the Twin Cities to tell the Obama administration to fulfill the government's promise to find a permanent home for nuclear waste that is stored in steel casks outside the power plant, Prairie Island Tribal Council Secretary Ron Johnson said.

 

"This is not just for Prairie Island but for all the waste sites around the United States," Johnson said. "We're worried about where those casks are going."

 

The casks are only 600 yards from the nearest homes on the tribe's land, he said.

 

Congress long ago approved a site in Nevada at Yucca Mountain for the facility, but the Obama administration last year disagreed. A presidential commission recommended last January that the government look for an alternative.

 

The Prairie Island nuclear power plant, which is operated by Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for an extension to its license to store its waste outdoors. Forty-year-old Prairie Island is expected to operate for another 20 years.

 

Court Seeks More Public Input on Nuclear Safety
Matthew L. Wald, The New York Times Green Blog
January 9, 2013

 

A federal appeals court has ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must either allow more public participation in its decisions about fire safety at the Indian Point 3 nuclear reactor or to show why such input is impractical or inappropriate.

 

A lawsuit brought by Richard L. Brodsky, a former New York State assemblyman and opponent of Indian Point, involves exemptions granted by the commission from compliance with some fire regulations. Like many reactors around the country, Indian Point installed a fire retardant called Hemyc around critical electric cables in the 1980s to meet a rule that the cables had to be safe from fire for one hour. But the material turned out to be nowhere near as fire-resistant as advertised.

 

In granting the exemption, the regulatory commission cut the amount of time that the retardant would have to be effective to a level that the plant could meet. Critics said this was unsafe, but the agency said it had re-analyzed the amount of time the substance actually needed to work to ensure safety.

 

The commission has also been struggling to modernize its fire protection regulations rather than giving so many case-by-case exemptions from its rules. And it has sometimes ruled that the plant's owner, Entergy, has not done enough to assure fire safety.

 

The decision by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, dated Monday and disseminated Tuesday, did not pass judgment on whether the commission's decisions had been correct. In fact, "we conclude that the plaintiffs' challenges to the N.R.C.'s grant for an exemption to Entergy from certain fire safety regulations in the operation of its Indian Point 3 nuclear power plant are generally without merit,'' it wrote.

 

Nonetheless, the appeals panel sent the case back to a lower court with instructions to have the commission "supplement the administrative record to explain why allowing public input into the exemption request was inappropriate or impracticable," or to "take such other action as it may deem appropriate to resolve this issue.''

 

The commission had argued that if members of the public did not like the decision, they could always appeal it. But the appeals court said that the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental impact statements and other steps to assure public participation in policy, seemed to require public input before a decision was made. That is, unless the commission can show why this is not the case.

 

A spokesman for the commission, Neil Sheehan, said it had not decided whether to appeal.

 

In a telephone interview, Mr. Brodsky declared victory. "Now the burden isn't on the public to show why they need to be part of the exemption process,'' he said. "The burden is on the N.R.C. to show why they shouldn't be. ''