These laboratories connect with the early laboratories set up during the World War II Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs. Chu's former laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley, was then called the Radiation Laboratory. It describes itself as the "oldest" of the national laboratories. http://www.lbl.gov/Publications/75th/ It and the other national nuclear laboratories were long run by the Atomic Energy Commission, which the Manhattan Project was turned into after the war. Then, because the AEC was such a zealous advocate of nuclear power, while supposedly a regulator of the technology, the AEC was eliminated by Congress in 1974 and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission and then a Department of Energy were created.
The DOE was given the mission of promoting nuclear power--a mission that Chu pursued as energy secretary. It also replaced the AEC in running the national nuclear laboratories.
Chu's position--"The fear of radiation shouldn't even enter into this. Coal is very, very bad"--doesn't acknowledge how radiation-causing nuclear technology as well as coal are both unnecessary, that "1 00 Percent of the Planet" can he powered by safe, really clean, renewable energy sources.
Who will replace Chu when he leaves the DOE helm at month's end? Obama's appointee could be more of the same.
Among the names seen as a possibility is that of Carol Browner. Working out of the White House, she was Obama's energy "czar" between 2009 and 2011, and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration. She is a nuclear power booster. Browner stressed at a New Millennium Nuclear Energy Summit in Washington in 2010 that the U.S. was "once at the forefront" of the nuclear industry. "We need to recapture that dominant position, and there's every reason to think we can," she declared. https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1269&mode=2&featurestory=DA_566093
By selecting Browner or another nuclear proponent, Obama would be sending the U.S. in the wrong energy direction--a direction not good for public health nor safely powering society and not good, either, to deal with climate change.
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