Mike Kluse was appointed
director of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland in 2007. The lab, which has 4,300 employees (including 790
PhDs) and a budget of nearly $1 billion, is one of nine multi-program national laboratories
within the U.S. Department of Energy.
On the lab’s evolving priorities: When I came here in 1997,
about half of our business was in environmental clean-up—dealing with waste
associated with the production of nuclear materials for the weapons program.
Today about half of our business is in homeland security. Fast forward: we are
in a sweet spot in terms of where the [Obama] administration is taking things
in energy and national security.
On energy research: What the national laboratories do well
is multi-disciplinary research. PNNL has a broad energy portfolio that is
focused on renewable energy; developing energy storage materials so that you
can store renewable energy [like wind energy] and introduce it to the
[transmission] grid when you need them; making the grid more secure; developing
new technology to burn coal more cleanly and efficiently; materials for storage
of energy for plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles; hydrogen energy; and
nuclear energy. As a country we have to be successful in all of those elements
if we are going to change the national energy picture.
On new approaches to commercializing alternative energy
sources: The challenges in energy are so large that no one lab, no one company,
no one agency can deal with it. We need to bring together government and
university laboratories with industry to get technology out faster. If [private
industry] sees technologies important to the future they are going to invest
money to get the technology out of the laboratory. The vast majority of the
energy infrastructure is owned by the private sector, so we need to bring them
in earlier and make them an integral part of our project teams.
On a community focus on research: We want to take advantage
of the expertise at our lab and at Washington State University to attract clean
energy companies to the Tri-Cities area. We partnered with [WSU’s] Tri-Cities
campus to create the new Bioproducts, Sciences and Engineering Laboratory.
We’ve moved 50 of our scientists and engineers into a new building on campus
along with nearly $10 million worth of DOE equipment. We will work side by side
with WSU faculty and students to come up with novel ways of converting biomass
to fuels as well as to chemicals.
On the lab’s national security mission: In
national security the [Obama Administration] has said our focus will be on
nuclear non-proliferation. This lab has a strong heritage in radiological
sensing and detection. The same science that you need to make plutonium and
determine its impact on environment can be used to detect any experimental or
testing work [that could lead to] proliferation. We also put radiation
detectors at the Port of Seattle, among other ports and border crossings. Our
laboratory has been training domestic and international border guards in
techniques for detecting chemical, biological and nuclear explosives technology
coming into ports and across borders. People we’ve trained have actually
stopped attempts to move nuclear material across borders.