[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 51 (Monday, March 25, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1922-S1925]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I believe climate change is real. I
believe that human emissions of greenhouse gases are a major cause of
climate change, and I believe the Democratic plan for climate change,
which the Senator from Texas just spoke about--the Green New Deal--is
so far out in left field that not many are going to take it seriously.
So as one Republican, I am here today to propose this response to
climate change, which is that the United States should launch a New
Manhattan Project for Clean Energy, a 5-year project with 10 grand
challenges that will use American research and technology to put our
country and our world firmly on the path for cleaner, cheaper energy.
Meeting these grand challenges would create breakthroughs in advanced
nuclear reactors, natural gas, carbon recapture, better batteries,
greener buildings, electric vehicles, cheaper solar power, and fusion.
To provide the tools to create these breakthroughs, the Federal
Government should double its funding for energy research and keep the
United States No. 1 in advanced computing. This strategy takes
advantage of the United States' secret weapon--our extraordinary
capacity for basic research and especially in our 17 National
Laboratories. It will strengthen our economy. It will raise family
incomes.
This strategy also recognizes that when it comes to climate change,
China, India, and other developing countries are the problem. American
innovation is the answer. According to the Global Carbon Project, over
the last 13 years the United States has reduced production of
greenhouse gases more than any other major country. Let me say that
again. According to the Global Carbon Project, over the last 13 years
the United States has reduced production of greenhouse gases more than
any other major country. But over the last 5 years, China and its
carbon emissions have risen. The U.S. reduction is largely thanks to
conservation and switching from coal to natural gas in the production
of electricity.
This is the way a California physicist explains it: Our mothers told
us as children to clean our plates because children in India were
starving. Now, cleaning our plates was a good thing for us to do, but
it didn't do much for starving children in India. In the same way,
reducing carbon emissions in the United States is a good thing to do,
but it doesn't do much to address climate change because most of the
increase in greenhouse gases is in developing countries. If we want to
do something about climate change, we should use American research and
technology to provide the rest of the world with tools to create low-
cost energy that emits fewer greenhouse gases.
The purpose of the original Manhattan Project during World War II was
to find a way to split the atom and build a bomb before Germany could.
The New York Times described this as the ``most concentrated
intellectual effort in history.'' Instead of ending a war, the goal of
the New Manhattan Project will be to minimize the disruption on our
lives and our economies caused by climate change, to clean the air, and
to raise family incomes, both in our country and in the rest of the
world, by creating large amounts of reliable, clean, inexpensive
energy.
Can a New Manhattan Project accomplish such bold breakthroughs in
just 5 years? Well, take a look at the last 5 years. Carbon emissions
from energy consumption are down by 230 million metric tons. The number
of electric vehicles has doubled and so has the median driving range
per charge. The utility scale cost of solar power has been nearly cut
in half. The number of homes has risen by 4 percent, but household
energy usage has decreased by 10 percent. We lost and then we reclaimed
the No. 1 spot in supercomputing. The cost of natural gas has been cut
in half, and the percent of electricity provided by natural gas has
increased from 27 percent to 35 percent. And that is all in the last 5
years.
I will not spend time in these remarks debunking the Green New Deal
because so many others have so effectively already done that.
Basically, the Green New Deal is an assault on cars, cows, and
combustion. With nuclear power available, its strategy for fighting
climate change with windmills makes as much sense as going to war in
sailboats. As a bonus, and as the Senator from Texas outlined, it
throws in free college, a guaranteed job with a government-set wage,
and it would take away private health insurance on the job from 170
million Americans, and no one has any earthly idea what it will cost
taxpayers.
You don't have to believe that humans cause climate change to believe
in the New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy, and you don't have to be
a Republican. Hopefully, the New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy can
become a bipartisan proposal. Many of its 10 grand challenges have been
proposed by the National Institute of Engineering and the National
Academy of Sciences. At different times, Barack Obama, John McCain,
Newt Gingrich, and Howard Dean have all called for a Manhattan Project
for new energy sources.
These are the 10 grand challenges:
First is advanced nuclear. Ninety-eight nuclear reactors produce 60
percent of all carbon-free electricity in the United States. There has
never been a death as a result of an accident at one of these reactors.
The problem is that in competition with natural gas and coal, these
reactors cost too much to build and some of them cost too much to
operate. According to the Energy Information Administration, 11
reactors may shut down over the next 5 years. Building the Vogtle
nuclear plant in Georgia--the only two new reactors being built in the
United States--could cost as much as $27.5 billion. Building two
natural gas plants to
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create the same amount of electricity would cost less than $2 billion.
We need to stop talking about advanced reactors and actually build
something. Within the next 5 years, we need to build one or more
advanced reactors to demonstrate the capabilities they may bring--lower
costs, increased safety, and less nuclear waste.
Natural gas. During the 1980s, American enterprise and technology
created a new, cheaper way to produce natural gas in the United States.
This helped our country lead the world in reducing carbon emissions
because natural gas has about half the carbon emissions as a typical
coal plant. Continuing to develop new combustion technologies will make
natural gas-fired electric generation more efficient and further reduce
carbon emissions.
Next is carbon capture. This is really the holy grail of clean
energy. Coal is cheap. There is a lot of it. Already we know how to
capture sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury from coal plants to clean the
air. We have seen that happen in Tennessee. If we can figure out a way
also to capture carbon at a cheaper cost and find large-scale uses for
its byproduct--for example, CO2 to ethanol--coal could be
used everywhere in the world. The Natural Resources Defense Council has
argued that after conservation, coal with carbon capture is the best
option for clean energy.
Next is better batteries. The all-electric Nissan Leaf that I bought
in 2011 had a hard time getting me from the Capitol to Dulles airport
and back. Its range was about 70 miles. Today, the Nissan Leaf can
travel 226 miles on one charge. A Tesla Model S can travel 335 miles on
one charge. The price of lithium-ion batteries should fall another 45
percent during the next 5 years. Better batteries can also one day
allow utilities and their customers to store large amounts of
electricity during nonpeak hours.
Greener buildings. Despite considerable recent progress, this is
still the real low-hanging fruit. Residential and commercial buildings
still consume 39 percent of U.S. energy.
The next grand challenge is electric vehicles. Ten years ago there
were no mass-produced electric cars on United States highways. Today
there are 1 million, and you read in the paper almost every day about a
major automaker making a large investment to make millions more.
Cheaper solar. Solar power has grown by 1,500 percent since 2011, but
it still accounts for only about 2 percent of U.S. electricity. The new
goal for the Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative is to lower the
cost of solar another 50 percent to 3 cents per kilowatt hour for
utility scale solar.
Then there is fusion. This is the ultimate green energy dream--to
make electricity on Earth the way the Sun makes it. Instead of
splitting elements, combine them and make clean, almost limitless
energy without waste. This is still a dream, but there can be
meaningful progress in the next 5 years.
Advanced computing. China, Japan, the United States, and the European
Union--all want to be first in advanced computing. The stakes are high
because the winner has an advantage in such things as advanced
manufacturing, simulating advanced reactors and weapons before they are
built, finding terrorists, saving billions of Medicaid waste, and
simulating the electric grid in a natural disaster.
The United States regained the No. 1 spot last year in advanced
computing, thanks to sustained funding by Congress during both the
Obama and Trump administrations, and we need to keep that position.
The final grand challenge is to double energy research funding.
Advanced computing is the first tool the New Manhattan Project needs to
meet its grand challenges. The second tool is money. It would take $6
billion annually to double funding for the Department of Energy's
Office of Science and its 17 National Laboratories, which is where most
of our Nation's basic energy research is done. By comparison, many
estimate the cost of the Green New Deal in the trillions.
This is a bold agenda and, hopefully, a bipartisan agenda. It is an
agenda that can, over the next 5 years, place Americans firmly on the
path toward dealing with climate change and at the same time produce
large amounts of reliable, clean energy that lifts family incomes in
our country and around the world.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a 2012 op-ed in the New
York Times, entitled ``The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic,''
authored by Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of
California, Berkeley, and, second, an address I made in Oak Ridge, TN,
in 2008, which called for a New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy
Independence, be printed in the Record following my remarks.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, July 28, 2012]
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
(By Richard A. Muller)
Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified
problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw
doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year,
following an intensive research effort involving a dozen
scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that
the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm
now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the
cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of
careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface
Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter
Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of
the earth's land has risen by two and a half degrees
Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of
one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years.
Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this
increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations
group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on
global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded
only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be
attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the
I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956
could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even
a substantial part of the more recent warming could be
natural.
Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical
methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert
Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature
much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised
by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our
results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior
groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available
temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from
poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations
and poor ones) and from human intervention and data
adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off).
In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially
troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.
The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt
dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic
eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect
sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth's
surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations
attributable to El Nino and other ocean currents such as the
Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the ``flattening''
of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not,
in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the
gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We
tried fitting the shape to simple math functions
(exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to
rising functions like world population. By far the best match
was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured
from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
Just as important, our record is long enough that we could
search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the
historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent.
Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that
variations in sunlight could have ended the ``Little Ice
Age,'' a period of cooling from the 14th century to about
1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of
the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes.
This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we've
learned from satellite measurements that solar activity
changes the brightness of the sun very little.
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon
dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we've
tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated
greenhouse effect--extra warming from trapped heat radiation.
These facts don't prove causality and they shouldn't end
skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered
seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at
least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a
second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn't change the
results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large,
complex global climate models, the huge computer programs
that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and
adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the
close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature
rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.
It's a scientist's duty to be properly skeptical. I still
find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate
change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've
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analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism
about them hasn't changed.
Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming.
The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been
going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar
bears aren't dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan
glaciers aren't going to melt by 2035. And it's possible that
we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago,
during the ``Medieval Warm Period'' or ``Medieval Optimum,''
an interval of warm conditions known from historical records
and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm
spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by
cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to ``global''
warming is weaker than tenuous.
The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five
scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site
also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present,
with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide,
but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four
of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the
scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the
analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with
the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the
heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions
implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.
What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions
increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect
the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one
and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if
the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid
economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the
last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds
one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could
take place in less than 20 years.
Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in
principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this
analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been
answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help
settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its
human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across
the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and
should be done.
____
A New Manhattan Project for Clean Energy Independence
Seven ``grand challenges'' for the next five years: Plug-in electric
cars and trucks, carbon capture, solar power, nuclear waste, advanced
biofuels, green buildings, fusion
May 9th, 2008
History
In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Sen. Kenneth
McKellar, the Tennessean who chaired the Appropriations
Committee, to hide $2 billion in the appropriations bill for
a secret project to win World War II.
Sen. McKellar replied, ``Mr. President, I have just one
question: where in Tennessee do you want me to hide it?''
That place in Tennessee turned out to be Oak Ridge, one of
three secret cities that became the principal sites for the
Manhattan Project.
The purpose of the Manhattan Project was to find a way to
split the atom and build a bomb before Germany could. Nearly
200,000 people worked secretly in 30 different sites in three
countries. President Roosevelt's $2 billion appropriation
would be $24 billion today.
According to New York Times science reporter William
Laurence, ``Into [the bomb's] design went millions of man-
hours of what is without doubt the most concentrated
intellectual effort in history.''
The goal: victory over blackmail
I am in Oak Ridge today to propose that the United States
launch a new Manhattan project: a 5-year project to put
America firmly on the path to clean energy independence.
Instead of ending a war, the goal will be clean energy
independence--so that we can deal with rising gasoline
prices, electricity prices, clean air, climate change and
national security--for our country first, and--because other
countries have the same urgent needs and therefore will adopt
our ideas--for the rest of the world.
By independence I do not mean that the United States would
never buy oil from Mexico or Canada or Saudi Arabia. By
independence I do mean that the United States could never be
held hostage by any country for our energy needs.
In 1942, many were afraid that the first country to build
an atomic bomb could blackmail the rest of the world. Today,
countries that supply oil and natural gas can blackmail the
rest of the world.
Not a new idea
A new Manhattan Project is not a new idea--but it is a good
idea and fits the goal of clean energy independence.
The Apollo Program to send men to the moon in the 1960s was
a kind of Manhattan Project. Presidential candidates John
McCain and Barack Obama have called for a Manhattan Project
for new energy sources. So have former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean,
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri--
among others.
And, throughout the two years of discussion that led to the
passage in 2007 of the America COMPETES Act, several
participants suggested that focusing on energy independence
would force the kind of investments in the physical sciences
and research that the United States needs to maintain its
competitiveness.
A new overwhelming challenge
The overwhelming challenge in 1942 was the prospect that
Germany would build the bomb and win the war before America
did.
The overwhelming challenge today, according to National
Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone, in his address
last week to the Academy's annual meeting, is to discover
ways to satisfy the human demand for and use of energy in an
environmentally satisfactory and affordable way so that we
are not overly dependent on overseas sources.
Cicerone estimates that this year Americans will pay $500
billion overseas for oil--that's $1,600 for each one of us--
some of it to nations that are hostile or even trying to kill
us by bankrolling terrorists. Sending $500 billion abroad
weakens our dollar. It is half our trade deficit. It is
forcing gasoline prices toward $4 a gallon and crushing
family budgets.
Then there are the environmental consequences. If worldwide
energy usage continues to grow as it has, humans will inject
as much CO2 into the air from fossil fuel burning between
2000 and 2030 as they did between 1850 and 2000. There is
plenty of coal to help achieve our energy independence, but
there is no commercial way (yet) to capture and store the
carbon from so much coal burning--and we have not finished
the job of controlling sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury
emissions.
The Manhattan Project model fits today
In addition to the need to meet an overwhelming challenge,
other characteristics of the original Manhattan Project are
suited to this new challenge:
It needs to proceed as fast as possible along several
tracks to reach the goal. According to Don Gillespie, a young
engineer at Los Alamos during World War II, the ``entire
project was being conducted using a shotgun approach, trying
all possible approaches simultaneously, without regard to
cost, to speed toward a conclusion.''
It needs presidential focus and bipartisan support in
Congress.
It needs the kind of centralized, gruff leadership that
Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers gave the
first Manhattan Project.
It needs to ``break the mold.'' To borrow the words of Dr.
J. Robert Oppenheimer in a speech to Los Alamos scientists in
November of 1945, the challenge of clean energy independence
is ``too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old
ideas.''
Most important, in the words of George Cowan as reported in
the excellent book edited by Cynthia C. Kelly, ``. . . The
Manhattan Project model starts with a small, diverse group of
great minds.''
I said to the National Academies when we first asked for
their help on the America COMPETES Act in 2005, ``In
Washington, D.C., most ideas fail for lack of the idea.''
The America COMPETES model fits, too
There are some lessons, too, from America COMPETES.
Remember how it happened. Just three years ago--in May
2005--a bipartisan group of us asked the National Academies
to tell Congress in priority order the 10 most important
steps we could take to help America keep its brainpower
advantage.
By October, the Academies had assembled a ``small diverse
group of great minds'' chaired by Norm Augustine which
presented to Congress and to the President 20 specific
recommendations in a report called ``Rising Above the
Gathering Storm.'' We considered proposals by other
competitiveness commissions.
Then, in January 2006, President Bush outlined his American
Competitiveness Initiative to double over 10 years basic
research budgets for the physical sciences and engineering.
The Republican and Democratic Senate leaders and 68 other
senators sponsored the legislation. It became law by August
2007, with strong support from Speaker Pelosi and the
President.
Not elected to take a vacation this year
Combining the model of the Manhattan Project with the
process of the America COMPETES Act has already begun. The
National Academies have underway an ``America's Energy
Future'' project that will be completed in 2010. Ralph
Cicerone has welcomed sitting down with a bipartisan group to
discuss what concrete proposals we might offer earlier than
that to the new president and the new Congress. Energy
Secretary Sam Bodman and Ray Orbach, the Energy Department's
Under Secretary for Science, have said the same.
The presidential candidates seem ready. There is bipartisan
interest in Congress. Congressman Bart Gordon, Democratic
Chairman of the Science Committee in the House of
Representatives--and one of the original four signers of the
2005 request to the National Academies that led to the
America COMPETES Act--is here today to offer his ideas.
Congressman Zach Wamp, a senior member of the House
Appropriations Committee who played a key role in the America
COMPETES Act, is co-host for this meeting.
I have talked with Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici,
the chairman and senior Republican on the Energy Committee
who
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played such a critical role in America COMPETES, and to Sen.
Lisa Murkowski, who likely will succeed Sen. Domenici as the
senior Republican on the Energy Committee.
Some say a presidential election year is no time for
bipartisan action. I can't think of a better time. Voters
expect presidential candidates and candidates for Congress to
come up with solutions for $4 gasoline, clean air and climate
change, and the national security implications of our
dependence on foreign oil. The people didn't elect us to take
a vacation this year just because there is a presidential
election.
So, how to proceed?
A few grand challenges--Sen. Bingaman's first reaction to
the idea of a new Manhattan Project was that instead we need
several mini-Manhattan Projects. He suggested as an example
the ``14 Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st
Century'' laid out by former MIT President Chuck Vest, the
president of the National Institute of Engineering--three of
which involve energy. I agree with Sen. Bingaman and Chuck
Vest.
Congress doesn't do ``comprehensive'' well, as was
demonstrated by the collapse of the comprehensive immigration
bill. Step-by-step solutions or different tracks toward one
goal are easier to digest and have fewer surprises. And, of
course, the original Manhattan Project itself proceeded along
several tracks toward one goal.
Here are my criteria for choosing several grand challenges:
Grand consequences, too--The United States uses 25 percent
of all the energy in the world. Interesting solutions for
small problems producing small results should be a part of
some other project.
Real scientific breakthroughs--This is not about drilling
offshore for oil or natural gas in an environmentally clean
way or building a new generation of nuclear power plants,
both of which we already know how to do--and, in my opinion,
should be doing.
Five years--Grand challenges should put the United States
within five years firmly on a path to clean energy
independence so that goal can be achieved within a
generation.
Family Budget--Solutions need to fit the family budget, and
costs of different solutions need to be compared.
Consensus--The Augustine panel that drafted the ``Gathering
Storm'' report wisely avoided some germane topics, such as
excessive litigation, upon which they could not agree,
figuring that Congress might not be able to agree either.
Seven grand challenges:
Here is where I invite your help. Rather than having
members of Congress proclaim these challenges, or asking
scientists alone to suggest them, I believe there needs to be
preliminary discussion--including about whether the criteria
are correct. Then, Congress can pose to scientists questions
about the steps to take to achieve the grand challenges.
To begin the discussion, I suggest asking what steps
Congress and the federal government should take during the
next five years toward these seven grand challenges so that
the United States would be firmly on the path toward clean
energy independence within a generation:
1. Make plug-in electric cars and trucks commonplace. In
the 1960s, H. Ross Perot noticed that when banks in Texas
locked their doors at 5 p.m., they also turned off their new
computers. Perot bought the idle nighttime bank computer
capacity and made a deal with states to manage Medicare and
Medicaid data. Banks made money, states saved money, and
Perot made a billion dollars.
Idle nighttime bank computer capacity in the 1960s reminds
me of idle nighttime power plant capacity in 2008. This is
why:
The Tennessee Valley Authority has 7,000-8,000 megawatts--
the equivalent of seven or eight nuclear power plants or 15
coal plants--of unused electric capacity most nights.
Beginning in 2010 Nissan, Toyota, General Motors and Ford
will sell electric cars that can be plugged into wall
sockets. FedEx is already using hybrid delivery trucks.
TVA could offer ``smart meters'' that would allow its 8.7
million customers to plug in their vehicles to ``fill up'' at
night for only a few dollars, in exchange for the customer
paying more for electricity between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m. when
the grid is busy.
Sixty percent of Americans drive less than 30 miles each
day. Those Americans could drive a plug-in electric car or
truck without using a drop of gasoline. By some estimates,
there is so much idle electric capacity in power plants at
night that over time we could replace three-fourths of our
light vehicles with plug-ins. That could reduce our overseas
oil bill from $500 billion to $250 billion--and do it all
without building one new power plant.
In other words, we have the plug. The cars are coming. All
we need is the cord.
Too good to be true? Haven't U.S. presidents back to Nixon
promised revolutionary vehicles? Yes, but times have changed.
Batteries are better. Gas is $4. We are angry about sending
so many dollars overseas, worried about climate change and
clean air. And, consumers have already bought one million
hybrid vehicles and are waiting in line to buy more--even
without the plug-in. Down the road is the prospect of a
hydrogen fuel-cell hybrid vehicle, with two engines--neither
of which uses a drop of gasoline. Oak Ridge is evaluating
these opportunities.
Still, there are obstacles. Expensive batteries make the
additional cost per electric car $8,000-$11,000. Smart
metering is not widespread. There will be increased pollution
from the operation of coal plants at night. We know how to
get rid of those sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury pollutants
(and should do it), but haven't yet found a way to get rid of
the carbon produced by widespread use in coal burning power
plants. Which brings us to the second grand challenge:
2. Make carbon capture and storage a reality for coal-
burning power plants. This was one of the National Institute
of Engineering's grand challenges. And there may be solutions
other than underground storage, such as using algae to
capture carbon. Interestingly, the Natural Resources Defense
Council argues that, after conservation, coal with carbon
capture is the best option for clean energy independence
because it provides for the growing power needs of the U.S.
and will be easily adopted by other countries.
3. Make solar power cost competitive with power from fossil
fuels. This is a second of the National Institute's grand
challenges. Solar power, despite 50 years of trying, produces
one one-hundredth of one percent of America's electricity.
The cost of putting solar panels on homes averages $25,000-
$30,000 and the electricity produced, for the most part,
can't be stored. Now, there is new photovoltaic research as
well as promising solar thermal power plants, which capture
the sunlight using mirrors, turn heat into steam, and store
it underground until the customer needs it.
4. Safely reprocess and store nuclear waste. Nuclear plants
produce 20 percent of America's electricity, but 70 percent
of America's clean electricity--that is, electricity that
does not pollute the air with mercury, nitrogen, sulfur, or
carbon. The most important breakthrough needed during the
next five years to build more nuclear power plants is solving
the problem of what to do with nuclear waste. A political
stalemate has stopped nuclear waste from going to Yucca
Mountain in Nevada, and $15 billion collected from ratepayers
for that purpose is sitting in a bank. Recycling waste could
reduce its mass by 90 percent, creating less stuff to store
temporarily while long-term storage is resolved.
5. Make advanced biofuels cost-competitive with gasoline.
The backlash toward ethanol made from corn because of its
effect on food prices is a reminder to beware of the great
law of unintended consequences when issuing grand challenges.
Ethanol from cellulosic materials shows great promise, but
there are a limited number of cars capable of using
alternative fuels and of places for drivers to buy it.
Turning coal into liquid fuel is an established technology,
but expensive and a producer of much carbon.
6. Make new buildings green buildings. Japan believes it
may miss its 2012 Kyoto goals for greenhouse gas reductions
primarily because of energy wasted by inefficient buildings.
Many of the technologies needed to do this are known.
Figuring out how to accelerate their use in a decentralized
society is most of this grand challenge.
7. Provide energy from fusion. The idea of recreating on
Earth the way the sun creates energy and using it for
commercial power is the third grand challenge suggested by
the National Institute of Engineering. The promise of
sustaining a controlled fusion reaction for commercial power
generation is so fantastic that the five-year goal should be
to do everything possible to reach the long-term goal. The
failure of Congress to approve the President's budget request
for U.S. participation in the International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor--the ITER Project--is embarrassing.
Anything is possible
This country of ours is a remarkable place.
Even during an economic slowdown, we will produce this year
about 30 percent of all the wealth in the world for the 5
percent of us who live in the United States.
Despite ``the gathering storm'' of concern about American
competitiveness, no other country approaches our brainpower
advantage--the collection of research universities, national
laboratories and private-sector companies we have.
And this is still the only country where people say with a
straight face that anything is possible--and really believe
it.
These are precisely the ingredients that America needs
during the next five years to place ourselves firmly on a
path to clean energy independence within a generation--and in
doing so, to make our jobs more secure, to help balance the
family budget, to make our air cleaner and our planet safer
and healthier--and to lead the world to do the same.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Ernst). Without objection, it is so
ordered.