Llewellyn
King
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October 8, 2007
Department of Energy
Turns 30, But There’s Little to Celebrate
This week, the Department of Energy (DOE) is celebrating its 30th
anniversary. I hope they hold it down. There is not much to cheer about.
When creation of the department was first bruited, the United States was
importing 30 percent of its oil needs. Now it imports 60 percent. Keep
the champagne on ice.
Over the course of its history, DOE has spent hundreds of billions of
dollars with little to show for it. If, as President Jimmy Carter
envisioned upon creating the department, it was supposed to improve
energy supplies, it has failed absolutely.
I
believe, but do not know, that DOE has succeeded in the stewardship and
renewal of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. I do know that the
department has helped to improve some energy technologies, such as a
better drill bit for oil extraction and better nuclear plant controls.
And it has developed some wonderful materials and technologies, which
were cold-shouldered by industry. Ceramic exhaust ports and valves for
the automobile industry come to mind.
But DOE failed to develop a commercially viable technology for using dry
hot rock in geothermal electric production. It also failed to develop a
workable model for in situ gasification of coal. Unintentionally, the
department found the limits of direct solar electric generation with
power towers and mirrors.
Where the department invention did work was through a program, now
phased out, of cooperative research and development agreements. These
helped many manufacturers, including fiber extruders, improve their
operations.
In the 1980s, it was hoped that DOE and its network of 25 major
laboratories would lead a technological revolution that would take the
United States to unimagined heights of creativity. That happened, but it
happened in Silicon Valley. So DOE fell back on cleaning up the nuclear
waste sites of earlier generations – dismantling old nuclear weapons and
pleasing politicians by accommodating their feel-good projects – think
the Clinton-Gore smart car and the Bush hydrogen car.
Importantly, DOE monitors nuclear testing around the world and is a lead
agency in issues of treaty verification.
In the beginning, there was the Atomic Energy Agency – a swaggering
promoter and defender of all things nuclear. When environmentalists
objected to its role as promoter and regulator, it was swept into a new
organization of mismatched agencies called the Energy Research and
Development Administration. That agency brought together such disparate
things as nuclear weapons manufacture, desalination and coal research,
each with its own political constituency on Capitol Hill. It even
enriched uranium – something that was later hived off to the private
sector.
The core of DOE, and its predecessors, is the national laboratory system
– an archipelago of gifted institutions that employ around 100,000
people. It is a gigantic repository for PhDs.
While the genius of the national labs is uncontested, so is the
duplication of their effort and their own bulwarks against reform. Do we
need so many of them? Is something learned by the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, studying hybrid vehicles, when
they are being studied in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the National
Transportation Laboratory? And why is government investing in
technologies that are established in the market?
The first secretary of the nascent department was James Schlesinger, who
had already distinguished himself as chairman of the Atomic Energy
Commission, director of the CIA and secretary of defense. Had this
rock-ribbed Republican been secretary of energy at a different time, he
might have advanced the streamlining of the national lab system.
Like Department of Homeland Security, DOE is a political semantic
creation. There are too many leaves in its portfolio for it to deliver
to the full extent of its talent or the national need.
I
was there at DOE's planting. I would like to be there at its pruning.
I
would like to be there when a secretary, both with the ability and the
mandate, transforms the department to something that might be called
“mission critical”. The current secretary, Samuel Bodman, appears to
have the credentials but not the mandate.
There are islands of excellence in the DOE archipelago, but they are set
in a sea of dysfunctional bureaucracy.
© 2007 North Star
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