Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
December 4, 2008
Wanted: Renaissance Person for Energy Secretary
While most of
Washington is fascinated with the triangle of strong personalities that
President-elect Barack Obama has empowered to preside over foreign
policy (Gen. Jim Jones, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden), another
constituency is wracked with the agony of hope. It is the bitterly
divided energy constituency that hopes that a new secretary of energy
will lean their way.
The most hopeful of
these are the greens who have taken Obama at his word, and who expect a
flood of money for wind, solar and biomass; great new jobs; and
crippling limits to the use of coal and nuclear.
But there is another
constituency that believes it is the real green alternative coal. Or,
more precisely clean coal. Already, this receives nearly $1 billion a
year in funding, much of it going to carbon capture and sequestration
a concept fraught with legal, political and technical difficulties but
popular with the utilities and the miners. Died-in-the-wool
environmentalists look at it as a trick at best and a semantic
obfuscation, designed to deceive the public, at worst. Clean or
otherwise, coal will be burned for decades to come most of it in its
dirty form, the experts tacitly acknowledge.
Another constituency
that was just feeling it could be listened to is nuclear. John McCain
raised hopes when he talked about 45 new reactors, and nuclear advocates
hoped that Obama heard that loud and clear.
Now, two clouds hang on
the nuclear horizon opposition in the Democratic Congress and the
credit drought. The advocates believe they can coax the Congress to
their point of view, especially with a pro-nuclear secretary. But they
are not so sure about the credit markets, even with loan guarantees. A
new plant could cost between $10 billion and $14 billion. That is a lot
of borrowing, and John Rowe, the chief of mighty Exelon Corporation, has
said no utility can build the plants unaided.
Then there are the
seldom heard but influential nuclear weapons hawks who would like to see
a secretary who understands the aging nuclear stockpile, and worries
about the effectiveness of weapons that have not been tested in a
generation. They want the stockpile updated; new weapons designed and
built and, if feasible, tested underground. They are said to be lead by
that grand old man of Washington policy wonks, former national security
adviser Brent Scowcroft. They point out that $20 billion of the
Department of Energys $25 billion budget is earmarked for weapons. It
goes to the somewhat autonomous National Nuclear Security
Administration.
To be secretary of
energy is to preside over a complex archipelago of almost totally
unrelated responsibilities. The department has nuclear waste, nuclear
verification, nuclear stockpiles, warhead decommissioning and various
black programs to deal with before one calorie of energy is produced.
A source with 30 years
of experience in the DOE warns: You cant turn a battleship around in
the bathtub, and budgeting here is like that.
The department is not
only remarkable in its reach but also in its staffing. It directly
employs about 7,000 people. But through the big nine national
laboratories, it has dominion over 130,000 people. This makes the DOE
unique and, in some respects, advantages it. While the labs work on
far-flung projects for other agencies, and sometimes private
corporations, they are controlled and funded by DOE. One secretary told
me: Its like having a private army. The labs, with all of their Ph.Ds,
will do anything so long as you fund them.
What is certain is that
the new secretary, unless he or she has had extensive experience with
the department, will be shocked to learn that the DOE has little to do
with energy today. It is really a series of giant sandboxes for
scientists to play in.
© 2008 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This
is Column # LK075.
Request permission to publish here. |