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Steven Chu steps down as US energy secretary
The Nobel laureate Steven Chu has
announced he is to resign as US
energy secretary. When Chu departs,
which as Physics World went to press
was expected to be by the end of February,
he will have served in the post
for four years – longer than any of the
14 previous heads of the Department
of Energy (DOE). Chu now plans to
return to “an academic life of teaching
and research” in California.
Politically independent, Chu
received plaudits from Democrats
and environmentalists during his
time as energy boss, which spanned
the whole of President Barack Obama’s
first term in office beginning
in 2008. “Steve helped my administration
move America towards
real energy independence,” Obama
said in a statement. “Over the past
four years we have doubled the use
of renewable energy, reduced our
dependence on foreign oil and put
our country on a path to win the
global race for clean-energy jobs.”
In a letter to DOE staff, Chu noted
his successes in office, such as funding
the Advanced Research Projects
Agency–Energy – a programme
to promote and fund research and
development in novel energy technologies.
The agency’s work in
areas such as improving batteries
for electric vehicles and developing
manufacturing technologies for
solar cells has drawn plaudits across
8
the board, as did his “SunShot initiative”
– an effort to increase US use
of renewable-energy technologies –
that began progress towards a goal of
reducing the cost of solar power to $1
per watt. “Secretary Chu has led the
energy department at a time when
our nation made the single largest
investment ever in clean energy
and doubled its use of renewables,”
stated Gene Karpinski, president of
the League of Conservation Voters.
Yet Chu also became a controversial
figure, facing heavy criticism
from Republicans, deniers of climate
change and some members of the
business community. Critics focused
on occasional failures of Chu’s initiatives,
such as Solyndra – a solar-cell
manufacturer that went bankrupt
after receiving $535m in DOE loan
Back to Earth
Canadian astronaut
Steve MacLean has
resigned as
president of the
Canadian Space
Agency to be
involved in a new
quantum-physics
venture in Waterloo.
Back to the lab
Nobel laureate
Steven Chu says that
he will now return to
“an academic life of
teaching and
research” in
California.
a spokesperson from the Perimeter
Institute declined to give any. In a
statement the institute said only that it
was “very pleased that the innovation
and technology cluster in the Waterloo
region has attracted someone of Steve
MacLean’s calibre” and that it looked
forward “to collaborating with him and
other partners who are building the
quantum valley”.
Information on MacLean’s plans
was also scarce at the University of
Waterloo, which is home to the new
$100m (C$160m) Mike and Ophelia
Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre that
was opened by Stephen Hawking last
year, as well as at Communitech,
a Waterloo-based hub that aims to
commercialize technologies. Both
physicsworld.com
guarantees – as well as A-123 Systems,
an innovative battery maker
that went bust before being rescued
by a Chinese conglomerate.
Daniel Kish, senior vice-president
of the Institute for Energy Research,
a Washington DC-based non-profit
corporation, asserted that the emphasis
on renewables has cost jobs. “The
policies and priorities of Chu’s energy
department have benefited our
global competitors and intensified
the economic pain felt by millions
of unemployed Americans,” he says.
Chu responded to those criticisms in
his letter to DOE’s employees. “The
truth is that only 1% of the companies
we funded went bankrupt,” he noted.
“The test for America’s policy-
makers will be whether they are
willing to accept a few failures in
exchange for many successes.”
The Obama administration will
now nominate a successor, with the
Democrat politicians Bill Ritter of
Colorado, Jennifer Granholm of
Michigan and Christine Gregoire of
Washington state as top favourites.
Yet there is a possibility that Chu’s
successor will be another scientist:
theoretical physicist Ernest Moniz
of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, who served as undersecretary
of energy for former US
president Bill Clinton.
Peter Gwynne
Boston, MA
Quantum physics
Plans for departing Canadian space chief kept under wraps
The head of the Canadian Space Agency
(CSA), Steve MacLean, quit as president
last month after revealing he is planning
to join a new quantum-physics venture in
Waterloo. The venture will be led by Mike
Lazaridis, who co-founded Research
In Motion – the company behind the
BlackBerry smartphone – and later set
up the prestigious Perimeter Institute
for Theoretical Physics, also in Waterloo.
Although details of the initiative
are being kept under tight wraps, it is
known that the new joint effort between
Lazaridis and MacLean will be separate
from the Perimeter Institute’s activities,
which focus on areas such as quantum
gravity, quantum information and
quantum fundamentals. But when asked
for more details on MacLean’s plans,
NASA/JSC
DOE
institutions told Physics World they had
no knowledge of the new initiative, while
MacLean himself did not respond to an
interview request.
MacLean received a BSc in physics in
1977 and a PhD in physics in 1983 from
York University in Toronto. That year he
was also selected as one of the first
six Canadian astronauts, going on two
missions to space in 1992 and 2006. On
the 1992 flight MacLean tested a laservision
system, a predecessor to robotic
arms such as the Canadarm2 that is
currently used on the International
Space Station to capture spacecraft. In
2008 he was named CSA president for a
five-year term.
Elizabeth Howell
Toronto
Physics World March 2013