Energy Secretary Richardson Meets with Advisory Board

On December 16, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson met for the first time with his Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB). In welcoming Richardson, SEAB Chair Walter Massey of Morehouse College cited some of the Secretary’s priorities for DOE: protecting national security, advancing the frontiers of science and technology, helping to solve the problems of global climate change, and promoting electricity deregulation, a balanced energy portfolio, and safe, efficient clean-up of DOE sites.

Richardson introduced ten new members of his Advisory Board (a full roster of members is available at http://www.hr.doe.gov/seab) . He then charged the board with two new tasks. He asked SEAB to begin an initiative focusing on “how the department relates to the communities in which we function.” He also asked the board to convene a subcommittee to review, and recommend priorities for, DOE’s four fusion technologies. This charge was prompted by language in the Senate FY 1999 Appropriations Committee report, which called for DOE to, “prior to committing to any future magnetic fusion program or facilities, conduct a broader review to determine which fusion technology or technologies the U.S. should pursue to achieve ignition and/or a fusion energy device.... At the very least, the review should develop a roadmap that justifies the continued development of each technology.” DOE conducts fusion energy R&D in pulsed power, lasers, ion drivers and magnetic fusion.

At the meeting, Secretary Richardson was presented with recommendations from several recently completed reports by SEAB subcommittees or other groups. The first report, by the external members of DOE’s Laboratory Operations Board, reviewed the efficiency, effectiveness, and contributions of the department’s small laboratories (those with annual budgets under approximately $50 million). In addition to recommendations specific to certain labs, the report concluded that “the Department would be best served if it moved toward collocation of small laboratories with larger facilities and if it avoided the establishment of small, isolated organizations to perform limited functions.” If new programs or tasks are identified, the report said, “consideration should be given to incorporating them into the work of existing Departmental or other Federal laboratories.... The priority should be to optimize how the resources at existing laboratories are used and to avoid the added administrative and management costs associated with small, limited-scope entities.”

SEAB’s Task Force on Education found that DOE’s collegiate and post-graduate programs provide excellent research opportunities and should be continued. However, it concluded that a huge potential exists for improvement of K-12 science education, and DOE should focus the balance of its efforts there. A summary of the report’s findings states that “the Department can make the greatest difference for the greatest number of students by...concentrating on programs which improve the quantity and quality of the Nation’s 1.4 million teachers of math and science.” The Task Force discouraged DOE from standardizing programs, admissions criteria, and stipends at the headquarters level, and called instead for adaptability at each laboratory. Last year, DOE tried to centralize funding for its science education programs in a line item at the headquarters level, but Congress deleted it. This year, Richardson predicted better luck in obtaining funding.

The Electric System Reliability Task Force addressed the problems of ensuring reliable electric power as the system is deregulated. Its main finding is as follows: “The Task Force believes that the primary challenges to bulk-power system reliability are presented by the transition itself, rather than by the end state of competition.” The Task Force called for legislation to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission explicit authority to oversee and enforce regulations, and encouraged the commission to support efforts to develop regional regulations.

The Openness Advisory Panel focused on issues of declassification, and accessibility, of DOE documents. According to the panel’s chairman, Richard Meserve, the main theme of the panel’s Interim Report is that “responsible openness is imperative” for DOE to gain credibility and fulfill its missions. Three subsidiary themes in the report include the imperative to safeguard nuclear weapons information, at a cost of approximately $100 million per year for classification; the need to make accessible most of the department’s estimated 6.75 billion pages of documents, of which only about five percent are classified; and the difficulty of changing from a Cold War culture of secrecy. Of immediate concern is legislation which will force the Secretary, by January 15, to submit a plan for declassifying specific amounts of information. Task Force members noted that there is a shortage of trained people to review the documents and determine what should be released, and because classification is an overhead expense, funds often get “siphoned off” for use elsewhere. Page-by-page review of the documents is impossible, Meserve noted, adding that they would have to be dealt with by a “risk management, rather than risk avoidance, approach.” Other issues the Task Force is addressing include allocation of resources for declassification, barriers to public access, and technologies for handling paper versus electronic information.

Richardson then left the meeting, saying that he was due to meet with officials of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to “appeal for my [FY 2000] budget.” Chief Financial Officer Michael Telson reviewed DOE’s FY 1999 appropriations, but warned that he could not say much about the request for FY 2000 while negotiations were ongoing between DOE and OMB. He reported that DOE “had a very good budget year last year,” with total budget growth of over six percent. Among other areas, Telson cited increases for nuclear stockpile stewardship, counterintelligence, fissile materials disposition, renewable energy, fossil energy, and nuclear energy. Science within DOE “was also very successful,” he said, with funding for base programs increasing by four percent. He pointed out that the increase to begin construction of the Spallation Neutron Source (up $107 million over FY 1998 funding to $130 million) “did not come at the expense of base programs.” Telson expects funding for the Spallation Source to continue to increase over the next few years.

The Administration is now involved in last-minute preparations of its FY 2000 budget request, which President Clinton is expected to submit to Congress early in February. As reported in FYI #168 , concerns have been raised about how well science funding and other discretionary areas will fare, because the final appropriations bill for fiscal year 1999 may cause some FY99 funding to be shifted to FY 2000.