Talking Points: Mike Kluse

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.

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