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Steering a national lab into the light

By Robert F. Service

Drive past the guardhouse at the entrance to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and you travel about 250 meters on Chu Road before it splits off onto other tentacles of the lab overlooking San Francisco Bay. Despite its short length, it's a fitting entrée. The road is named for 1997 physics Nobelist Steven Chu, who became the lab's sixth director 2 years ago and ever since has been working to steer its research in a new direction. His focus: a sweeping agenda aimed at making solar energy a practical, commercial, and world-changing reality.

Since taking his new job, Chu, 58, has traveled the globe making the case for solar power. Some of the refrains are familiar: retreating glaciers, more-damaging storms, and sea-level rise. Some, though, are less well known, such as how increased water evaporation from soils could jeopardize farming in the Midwestern United States. "Sustainable, carbon-neutral energy is the most important scientific challenge we face today," Chu is fond of saying.

	Chu is working to raise awareness and funds to fight climate change. Photo courtesy of Roy Kaltschmidt/LBNL.

On the supply side, Chu says current carbon-neutral energy sources face a host of problems. Wind, nuclear power, and biofuels are unlikely anytime soon to meet all of the needs of a civilization that in 2005 was using energy in all forms at a rate of about 16 trillion watts, with roughly 80% of it coming from fossil fuels. Solar power also has limitations, but the sun beams more energy toward Earth in an hour than all 6 billion of us use in a year. The challenge is finding ways to capture and store that energy that are cheap and efficient.

To meet that challenge, Chu has launched three separate initiatives to yoke at least part of LBNL research to a solar agenda. The first is a proposal to team up with fellow national labs Sandia and Lawrence Livermore and build one of two $125 million BioEnergy Institutes to be funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) that, over 5 years, will propel advances in nanotechnology and synthetic biology into better ways of making biofuels. Second is to win a $500 million pot put up by the oil giant BP for a biofuels institute. Finally, an initiative called Helios will look beyond bioenergy to include topics such as nanotech-based photovoltaics and fuel-generating catalysts. Although none of the proposals had been funded by the time Science went to press, Chu already has verbal commitments from private sources of about $50 million and up to $70 million from the state of California. "You try to make some rain and get some funding," Chu says.

If that funding comes, Chu expects little trouble getting scientists to follow and little opposition within LBNL, because the programs would expand the lab's current $525 million annual budget rather than cut into existing programs. The new programs also wouldn't affect the lab's four national user facilities--a synchrotron, an electron microscopy center, a nanofabrication facility, and a supercomputing center-- other than to encourage users to target their research on improving solar power generation. So far, Chu's ambitions are getting a warm reception both inside and outside the lab. "I think it's great," says physicist Nate Lewis of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, adding: "If you need to lay more golden eggs, the only proven way is to buy more chickens." "[Getting] Chu was a coup," adds Carolyn Bertozzi, a University of California, Berkeley, chemist, who also directs the Molecular Foundry, DOE's nanofabrication user facility. "He's really been able to inspire people."

Asked why he decided 2 years ago to quit Stanford University and move up the road to LBNL, Chu doesn't hesitate. "I was drying up as a scientist and had nowhere to go," he deadpans before breaking up. In reality, his lab of 13 students and postdocs was thriving. He moved there in 1987 after 9 years at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he did the work that won him a share of a Nobel Prize: developing laser-based techniques to cool clusters of atoms to just above absolute zero. He continues to pursue that work, although he's slowly shifting his lab over to work in biophysics. In truth, he says, he was propelled to make the move by his concern over climate change. "It's quite sobering," Chu says of the scale of the task. "This is a problem we have to address, and we have a limited amount of time to do it. What we do in the first half of this century, we will see the consequences for the next 500 to 1000 years."

Chu knows full well that solving this problem is certain to involve government policy and international diplomacy, and it may even depend more on building codes than science. But he seems to thrive on the multifaceted challenge, gliding effortlessly between diverse topics such as how local tax policy in China stops that country from adhering to its own clean-air regulations, whether CO2 pumped to the ocean floor will stay put, and the potential of architectural innovations to reduce the amount of energy used to heat, cool, and light buildings.

In the end, Chu says, it will take an array of solutions to hold carbon emissions to manageable levels. And they have to start happening fast. Says Chu: "We don't have the option to fail on this one."

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