ScienceInsider

by Adrian Cho

According to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu, DOE will abandon its plan to store spent fuel from nuclear reactors and other high-level nuclear waste in an underground repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. At a briefing on the proposed 2011 federal budget today in Washington, D.C., Chu announced that DOE will withdraw its application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build the repository. The decision ends a decades-long controversy that began when Congress chose the site in 1987 and politicians and denizens of Nevada began to fight the plan.

“It’s not a major surprise, but until they did this, Yucca Mountain was still by law the repository for high-level nuclear waste,” in the United States, says Thomas Isaacs, a nuclear engineer and expert on nuclear policy at Stanford University. Even before he was elected, President Barack Obama had said that Yucca Mountain was not an option for a nuclear repository, says Isaacs, who was involved in the search for suitable sites for such a repository.

So many things went wrong in the development of the plans for the Yucca Mountain site that, “you can point your finger in any direction and find someone to blame,” Isaacs says. One major problem, he says, was that the federal law mandating the development of the repository was so rigid that it left DOE little flexibility to work with the local community and the State of Nevada. “It was so explicit that it made it very difficult for the program to operate in a manner that was going to build the kind of trust that will last for the decades it takes to complete one of these projects.”

Still, Isaacs says he’s optimistic that a site for a repository can be found, noting that one for lower-level waste—such as contaminated gloves and booties from defense facilities—was successfully sited in Carlsbad, New Mexico. DOE has formed a blue-ribbon panel to consider the issue of managing high-level waste. However, at the briefing, Chu said that the panel would focus on broad waste issues; it is not charged with picking a new repository site.

by Adrian Cho

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science gets a healthy $226 million funding increase, to $5.12 billion, in the proposed 2011 budget. The lion’s share of the 4.6% increase would be go to the basic energy sciences (BES) office, which funds research into condensed matter physics, materials science, chemistry, and related fields and runs DOE’s x-ray synchrotrons and other user facilities. BES’s budget climbs from $1.637 billion to $1.835 billion, an increase of $198 million or 12.1%.

In contrast, funding for DOE’s fusion energy sciences (FES) program gets clipped from an estimated $426 million this year to a requested $380 million next year, a reduction of 10.8%. That reduction would come out of the United States’s contribution to the international fusion experiment, ITER, which will be built in Cadarache, France. Under the proposed budget, ITER would get $80 million next year, down from an estimated $135 million this year. The decrease marks the latest dip on the ITER budget roller coaster. In 2008, Congress zeroed out $150 million of spending on ITER in a squabble with the White House. The project got $124 million the following year.

by Antonio Regalado

SÃO PAULO—Big Oil is making one of its biggest biofuel investments to date with a $12 billion venture here that joins a major petroleum company with an ethanol producer. Cosan, Brazil’s largest biofuels maker, said today that it will merge its 23 ethanol-producing sugarcane mills with Royal Dutch Shell’s network of 2740 domestic gas stations. Research into a next-generation fuel—cellulosic ethanol from sugarcane—may have played a critical role in shaping the deal.

by Eli Kintisch

Federal budget day has dawned on Washington, D.C., and the numbers the Administration is proposing for 2011 are coming in fast and furious. Science's team of reporters will be posting items throughout the day as we analyze the numbers, so be sure to keep coming back to Insider.

An early eyebrow-raiser? President Barack Obama wants to spend $300 million next year on the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the blue-sky science arm of the Department of Energy (DOE). The 3-year-old agency got off to a fast start with $400 million of Recovery Act money to spend in 2009 and 2010. But Congress has yet to bestow any funds on ARPA-E through the normal appropriations process, so it's unclear how lawmakers will respond to Obama's proposal to give so much to the new agency. The $300 million for ARPA-E in such a tough overall budget environment means that Energy Secretary Steve Chu has successfully shepherded the program through the Office of Science and Technology Policy and White House budgeteers, which is no small feat. Also impressive for Chu: DOE's Office of Science would get a 4.6% increase in 2011, to $5.12 billion. The money would fund a gaggle of programs at U.S. universities and the national labs.

With budget austerity a main theme both for the White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress, the normal caveat—that these numbers are just a proposal that lawmakers must approve or alter—is more important than ever this year.

by Eli Kintisch

The New York Times offers vague hints about good news for supporters of scientific research in the budget that will be released at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Given the lack of detail, the news reads like a sanctioned leak from the White House, as opposed to a story the paper wrote after obtaining budget documents:

The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which begins in October, will identify the winners and losers behind Mr. Obama’s proposal for a three-year freeze of a portion of the budget. Many programs at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department are in line for increases, along with the Census Bureau.

Among the losers would be some public works projects of the Army Corps of Engineers, two historic preservation programs and NASA’s mission to return to the Moon, which would be ended as the administration seeks to reorient the space program to use private companies for launchings.

by Barbara Casassus

PARIS—At the end of 2008, France’s Evaluation Agency for Research and Education (AERES) offered a devastating critique of the country’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM). Yesterday, AERES released much more muted evaluation reports on the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA).

by Eli Kintisch

The decision by senior party figure Byron Dorgan (D-SD) not to run for reelection next year is being seen as a big blow for Democrats. But what will the retirement of Dorgan, the Senate's top man on physical science funding, mean for science?

Too early to tell. But it's worth reviewing Dorgan's record as he prepares to work up his last budget for the Department of Energy (DOE).

by Eli Kintisch

Air and ocean transport make up only 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But projections spelled out in a new report reviewing the issue by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change suggests that by 2050 the total amount of carbon pollution from these sources could increase tenfold, depending on population, economics, and technology trends. Were that to happen, emissions would be as high as the entire transportation sector, which takes up 14% of global greenhouse emissions, currently dominated by pollution from cars and trucks. "It's startling what the potential for growth in this field is," says report co-author David Greene of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

by John Pickrell and Eli Kintisch

In a new development roughly 45 countries with tropical rainforests are proposing to cut their deforestation by a quarter in 5 years as part of a deal to be finalized next week at the Copenhagen climate conference.

That was the statement by Kevin Conrad*, a negotiator with Papua New Guinea, at a press conference today. Behind closed doors negotiators are making headway towards an agreement that would for the first time put cutting deforestation under the U.N. climate treaty. But a number of key issues related to the U.N. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries—also known as REDD—are still leading to acrimony and may get table and remain unresolved when political leaders arrive in Copenhagen next week to finalize a general framework.

The funds that might support forest protection are slowly coming together. Yesterday President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom said they wanted 20% of global mitigation finance to go to REDD. “If all of these things comes together we can get going on forests now and not continue to watch them burn while we wait for a treaty to be worked out,” said Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of 29 organizations fighting deforestation. “This is one of the best deals on the table at Copenhagen for getting carbon out of the atmosphere quickly.”

by Jeffrey Mervis

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office plans to speed up reviews of applications from would-be inventors of various "green" technologies. Announcing the new pilot program yesterday at a press conference, USPTO Director David Kappos said that the current 40-month wait for a final decision is "far too long" and that it "delays innovation." Commerce Secretary Gary Locke added that it's one reason the United States trails other countries in commercializing alternative energy solutions.

But can an accelerated review process really help the United States reduce its carbon emissions and make the country more energy efficient, as Locke argues? Or is it more likely to be what one Washington insider calls a "feel-good" exercise, unveiled on the first day of the international climate meeting in Copenhagen, to show that the Patent Office is doing its part to combat global warming?