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Nuclear Regulation In An Era of Growth And Change

Gregory B. Jaczko, Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Special Session
co-sponsored by Woods Institute for the Environment, Precourt Institute for Energy, and Global Climate and Energy Project

With 104 operating nuclear plants in the United States, and dozens more on the drawing boards, who is protecting the public and the environment? Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko will discuss the simultaneous challenges of overseeing the existing fleet of reactors, managing in parallel multiple reactor design certification requests and multiple plant construction license requests, and overseeing the safety of and licensing an expansion of the nuclear fuel industry to support new plants, not to mention the storage of spent fuel.

Flier of Chairman Gregory Jaczko's Talk

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Accelerating the Global Transition to Electric Vehicles

Joe Paluska, Vice President of Communications, Better Place

Wednesday, May 12, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Better Place, the leading electric vehicle services provider, is accelerating the global transition to sustainable transportation. Better Place is building the infrastructure and intelligent network to deliver a range of services to drivers, enable widespread adoption of electric vehicles, and optimize energy use. The Better Place network addresses historical limitations to adoption by providing unlimited driving range in a convenient and accessible manner. The company works with all parts of the transportation ecosystem, including automakers, battery suppliers, energy companies, and the public sector, to create a compelling solution. Based in California and privately held, Better Place has operating companies in Israel, Denmark, Australia, and is engaged in emerging EV markets in Europe, US and China.

In the last two years, the world has seen an unprecedented momentum toward electric vehicles. Leadership by governments committed to electrification, together with the right economics and policy, is catalyzing a race in the global automotive industry toward electrification. While primary motivations for countries leading on electrification differ form oil dependence to developing globally dominant automotive industries to zero-emission transportation and integration of renewable generation, the answer is the same. Electrification enables all of these benefits, if it is done at scale. Yet even as China, Europe and other markets surge forward with electric vehicles, the US lags behind. This session will explore the global momentum for electrification, the barriers and opportunities to mass adoption of electric vehicles, and the lessons for the US on the economics and policy of EV’s. 
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Nuclear Power: How, Why, Barriers

Burton Richter, Director Emeritus, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Prof. Burton Richter’s book, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, is now available. It is written for the non-expert and goes over climate change (what we know, how we know it, uncertainties), energy options (supply, emissions, potential), and policy options (sensible, senseless, and self-serving). Nuclear energy is one of the options discussed and that will be the main focus of this seminar.

Nuclear energy as a source of electricity is growing worldwide. In Europe, even Germany is reconsidering its commitment to shut down its nuclear plants soon. Other countries like Italy, which abandoned its nuclear energy program after the Chernobyl accident, are returning to nuclear power as a way to meet their greenhouse gas reduction targets. In Asia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea are undergoing a major nuclear energy expansion, some because of the need for more secure energy supplies, others for reasons similar to Europe’s. Opponents of nuclear energy cite four issues: cost, radiation and accident potential, waste disposal, and risk of more proliferation of weapons. All of these issues will be reviewed.

Please join us for a book signing and reception following the talk.

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Making large scale solar work: What is needed and what role can Stanford play?

Margot Gerritsen, Stanford University

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Most stakeholders agree that solar energy can provide a significant percentage of U.S. electrical needs over the coming decades. National public support of solar energy projects, and large scale solar projects, is strong. Despite the support and excitement, the first of the newly proposed, and fast-tracked, large scale solar projects are facing significant hurdles. Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment recently hosted a two-day forum in which industry, NGOs, policy makers and scientists discussed these challenges and brainstormed ideas to meet them. Margot Gerritsen, who led the forum, will discuss the outcomes of this fascinating forum. Questions addressed in her talk include: Why is there broad excitement about large scale solar? What are fast track projects, and why are they facing high hurdles? What do tortoises have to do with large scale solar projects? How can we make large scale solar work, and what role can Stanford play?

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China’s Growing Global Influence: A Solar Energy Perspective

Reyad Fezzani, Chief Executive Officer, BP Solar

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Reyad Fezzani is CEO of BP Solar, a pioneering, global solar energy company of BP. Reyad has lived and worked in many parts of the world from which he has developed a deep knowledge and understanding of global business and economics. He will speak from first-hand experience about the peaceful rise of Chinese capitalism, including its recent and growing influence in the solar energy industry.

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COP15 and the Stanford Student Experience

Stephen Schneider, Melvin & Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, and Senior Fellow at Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Stephen H. Schneider is the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Biology Professor, and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. He was an NCAR scientist from 1973-1996, where he co-founded the Climate Project. Schneider focuses on climate change science, integrated assessment of ecological and economic impacts of human-induced climate change, and identifying viable climate policies and technological solutions. He has consulted for federal agencies and White House staff in six administrations. Involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1988, he was a Coordinating Lead Author, Working Group II, Chapter 19, "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change" and a Synthesis author for the Fourth Assessment Report. He along with four generations of IPCC authors received a collective Nobel Peace Prize for their joint efforts in 2007. Elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2002, Schneider received the American Association for the Advancement of Science/ Westinghouse Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology and a MacArthur Fellowship for integrating and interpreting the results of global climate research. Founder/Editor of Climatic Change, he has authored or co-authored over 500 books, scientific papers, proceedings, legislative testimonies, edited books and chapters, reviews and editorials. Schneider counsels policy makers, corporate executives, and non-profit stakeholders about using risk management strategies in climate-policy decision-making, given the uncertainties in future projections of global climate change and climate impacts. He is actively engaged in improving public understanding of science and the environment through extensive media appearances and communications and public outreach.

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The Energy Challenge and the Case for Fusion

Chris Llewellyn Smith, President of the Council of SESAME (Synchrontron Light for Experimental Science and its Applications in the Middle East), Vice President of the Royal Society, Visiting Professor at Oxford University

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Providing adequate food, water and energy for the world’s rising population, in the face of looming climate change and (in the longer-term) depletion of fossil fuels, is the greatest challenge of the 21st century. Provision of adequate energy is the key, necessary, condition for meeting the challenge. The developed world could survive perfectly well with less energy, but an increase is needed to lift billions out of poverty in the developing world, where a quarter of the world’s population lacks electricity. Meeting future demand will be difficult enough: meeting it in an environmentally responsible manner will be an enormous challenge. I will review the nature of the challenge and the portfolio of measures that must be adopted if it is to be met. These include greater efficiency, the deployment of carbon capture and storage (if feasible), expansion of the use of renewable energy sources to the maximum extent reasonably possible, and major expansion of nuclear power. In the second half of the century major contributions will be needed from nuclear power (in the longer term: thorium and/or fast breeder reactors), and/or solar power, and/or fusion: all must be developed as a matter of urgency. I will put special emphasis on fusion, which is still in the development phase, because of its enormous potential, and because I have been working on fusion. The technical challenge is enormous, but the political and economic challenges are even greater.
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Controlling Climate Change after Copenhagen

Bert Metz, former co-chair IPCC Working Group on Mitigation of Climate Change, author of "Controlling Climate Change", and advisor to the European Climate Foundation.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Bert Metz discusses his new book, Controlling Climate Change, which provides an unbiased and comprehensive overview, based on the latest findings of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Using no jargon, it looks at tackling and adapting to man-made climate change, and works through the often confusing potential solutions. He provides a cutting edge assessment of issues at the top of the political agenda, covering scenarios to limit the consequences of warming to manageable proportions, transitions to a low carbon and climate resilient economy, the most important measures in the various economic sectors and their potential costs. The implications of the poor results of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit will also be discussed.
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Integrating More Than 50% Wind on the Grid: A Case Study

Marija Ilić, Carnegie Mellon University

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

In this lecture we pose the problem of sustainable electricity services as a novel systems engineering design problem. We briefly summarize today's operating and planning practices and explain why these need fundamental changing in order to enable qualitatively different electricity services. In particular, we suggest that many new resources have characteristics, which are not generally known to the system operators, and are, therefore, currently not relied on for managing supply and demand in an often-congested electric network. The new resources are also highly variable and, as such, do not lend themselves to static feed-forward scheduling without near-real time automated feedback. Instead, a transformation of this operating and planning mode into an interactive multi-temporal, multi-spatial and multi-contextual system management is needed to accommodate ever-changing system conditions, often driven by many distributed actions. In order to enable a complex system with often-conflicting functionalities, such as reliability, security, short- and long-term efficiency, and sustainability, one must rely on prediction, adaptation and adjustments by all.
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Extending the Grid: Transmission Siting Issues and How to Resolve Them

Suedeen Kelly, Former Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All

Abstract:
In energy planning circles, in all sectors of the electric industry, in state utility regulatory commissions, and on Capitol Hill, we’ve heard a lot of discussion over the past year about changing the traditional paradigm surrounding the building of electric transmission in order to extend the country’s electric grid. Recently, the talk has moved into the arena of action. In the U.S. House and Senate, there are numerous bills that propose legislative changes to how we plan and site transmission in America—and how we allocate the cost of it. The Waxman-Markey Climate Change bill, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives last year, includes such changes. All of the various bills differ one from the other. One similarity among them all is that the federal government’s role (in the person of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) would be expanded and the states’ role would be reduced.

Why is there a growing consensus for change? What’s wrong with how we’ve always done things? (How have we always done things?) Is there a problem here? What are the proposed changes? What are we trying to accomplish with change? What is the best proposal being put forward? Who likes the changes? Who stands to benefit from the changes? Will there be any losers? Ms. Kelly intends to answer these questions during her presentation. She will also discuss what is likely to happen to the U.S. electric grid if we do not see any legislative change from Congress.
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