Word: chu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...easy to see how Chu ended up as a workaholic. At times, he hinted at an emotional price, mentioning offhandedly that a son from a previous marriage quit school and was "trying to find himself." But Chu found his niche in the lab, building state-of-the-art lasers from spare parts to tinker with quarks and "high-Z hydrogen-like ions," preferring the rigor of experiments that either worked or didn't to abstract theoretical physics. At Bell Labs, he spent phone-monopoly money playing with electron spectrometers, gamma rays, polymers and other gee-whiz stuff...
...After winning his Nobel while at Stanford in 1997, Chu gradually concluded that global warming was the biggest problem facing mankind and decided to change fields to help solve it. He admired the Nobel laureates whose discoveries sparked the agricultural Green Revolution that averted a global hunger crisis, and he couldn't justify fiddling with molecules when a new Green Revolution was needed to avert a climate crisis. LBNL scientist Art Rosenfeld, Chu's mentor on energy issues, can relate: he was once a star particle physicist, the last student of Enrico Fermi's, but during the crisis...
...Chu took over LBNL in 2004 and immediately refocused the lab on researching commercially viable solutions to big energy problems. He set up two bioenergy institutes - one funded by a controversial $500 million grant he secured from British Petroleum - and spearheaded a major project to investigate solar energy. "Steve is a visionary, and he really galvanized the lab with his vision," says Paul Alivisatos, who was Chu's deputy there. But some scientists bristled at Chu's demand for dramatic scientific breakthroughs - brand-new ways to store energy, sequester carbon or fuel cars - as opposed to incremental engineering improvements. "Chu...
...Environmentalists are generally ecstatic about Chu, but at a time when coal plants and heavily subsidized corn ethanol are creating huge environmental problems, some question his enthusiasm for "clean coal" and "third-generation biofuels," which do not yet exist, as well as his support for new nuclear power, which has become wildly expensive. They recall President George W. Bush talking up future technological miracles as an alternative to present-day action, and they want Chu to focus on proven technologies that can help boost efficiency and conservation to reduce energy demand now, plus on renewables to create zero-emissions supply...
...fact, Chu is already an efficiency nut. His California house was so well insulated, it barely needed air conditioning, and he's now weatherizing his D.C. home. He's pushing 24 new appliance standards that languished under Bush; at Tsinghua, he explained that existing efficiency rules for U.S. refrigerators alone save more energy than the controversial Three Gorges Dam in China's Hubei province will produce. He's especially obsessed with promoting white roofs and light-colored pavement, constantly citing Rosenfeld's calculation that having them throughout the U.S. would save as much carbon as taking every...