Marking a major milestone in the effort to spur private sector investments in clean energy and create new jobs for America's workers, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced $502 million in the first round of awards from an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) program that provides cash assistance to energy production companies in place of earned tax credits. The new funding creates additional upfront capital, enabling companies to create jobs and begin construction that may have been stalled until now. "The Recovery Act is investing in our long-term energy needs while creating jobs in communities around the country," said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. "This renewable energy program will spur the manufacture and development of clean energy in urban and rural America, allowing us to protect our environment, create good jobs and revitalize our nation's economy."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world's largest business federation, wants to put climate change science on trial. In an attempt to head off a U.S. EPA finding that climate change endangers public health and welfare in the United States, the Chamber Tuesday petitioned the federal agency for a trial-like hearing of the scientific evidence before an administrative judge or EPA official. "An endangerment finding would give rise to the most far-reaching rulemaking in American history," the Chamber said in its petition. "Before embarking on that long, costly process, EPA ought to do everything possible to assure the American people of the ultimate scientific accuracy of its decision."

In the world of renewables, most of the attention is on the wind and the sun. Geothermal power just hasn't gotten the same respect. That could be changing, as both the Obama Administration and Silicon Valley are considering the heat under the ground as a potentially huge source of clean, domestic U.S. energy, but recent setbacks are calling into question how much geothermal can contribute. Given the potential benefits, we should be doubling our efforts to make geothermal a viable power source for the U.S. Some background: All thermal power plants use the same basic process. A heat source (burning coal or gas, uranium, concentrated solar energy) is used to turn water into steam, and the energy released turns a turbine that produces electricity. What sets geothermal apart is that the steam comes directly from the ground. Water percolates down through cracks in the ground and is heated to the boiling point by hot rocks underground (in some cases coming back up as a geyser - think Old Faithful), and the resulting steam is drawn up via a well to a turbine.

Energy plans, like health-care plans, tend to be complex. These days they are particularly complicated because any modern energy plan needs to dovetail with real solutions to climate change, perhaps the single most urgent socio-environmental issue mankind has ever confronted. With regard to timing, energy plans must differentiate between what we can realistically do in the next five to 10 years and what we can hope to achieve by 2030 to 2050. Simply put, most Americans want access to reliable, affordable and increasingly sustainable power. Yes, we're all worried about national security. We're also concerned that the burden and benefit of a new energy plan be shared equitably among the various regions of our country. But consumers are tired of promises for the distant future. We don't want to try to plumb more than a thousand pages of strategy to discern what the goal might be for tomorrow. We want a comprehensible plan for the here and now.

No fish can escape mercury pollution. That's the take-home message from a federal study of mercury contamination released Wednesday that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the country. The toxic substance was found in every fish sampled, a finding that underscores how widespread mercury pollution has become. But while all fish had traces of contamination, only about a quarter had mercury levels exceeding what the Environmental Protection Agency says is safe for people eating average amounts of fish. The study by the U.S. Geological Survey is the most comprehensive look to date at mercury in the nation's streams. From 1998 to 2005, scientists collected and tested more than a thousand fish, including bass, trout and catfish, from 291 streams nationwide.

A basic problem for wind turbines is that the wind often dies down. As a result, they produce far less electricity than if the wind blew constantly, at full speed. A good wind machine, therefore, may harvest just 30 percent of its maximum potential energy. By contrast, a nuclear reactor with a similar energy rating might reach 90 percent of its maximum potential, because it is running virtually nonstop.

Climate change legislation before Congress would boost electricity prices by about 20 percent by 2030, although most of the increases wouldn't begin until after 2020, a government analysis concluded Tuesday. The Energy Information Administration said the ability to contain the cost to consumers depends largely on whether the country is successful in a "large scale" expansion of nuclear power and renewable energy sources that do not emit greenhouse gases and the deployment of carbon-capture technology at coal plants. Legislation, already approved by the House and expected to be taken up in the Senate later this year, would require carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions be cut by 17 percent over the next 11 years and by 83 percent by mid-century. Opponents of the bill have said such a shift would lead to soaring energy costs, especially for electricity.

US President Barack Obama's choice to head the Department of Energy's nuclear power programs told a Senate panel Tuesday that he would more closely integrate the development of new nuclear power and solving the problem of nuclear waste. "It is critical to take an integrated approach that considers the entire nuclear fuel cycle," Warren Miller told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee during his confirmation hearing. Miller has been nominated as both assistant secretary of nuclear energy and the director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. During the previous administration, DOE staffed the positions with separate officials. Combining the two offices under one official comes as the administration moves to kill the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which has long been planned for Nevada.

he following column was coauthored by Benjamin Urquhart, a research associate at Harvard University's Center for the Environment, and Mark Winkler, a PhD student at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Over time, the global energy infrastructure must change because the continued combustion of fossil fuels is altering Earth's climate in potentially dangerous ways and because the large wealth transfer from mostly democratic oil-importing countries to mostly autocratic oil-exporting countries is propping up repressive regimes worldwide. So, we know that the world's energy infrastructure must change. But, the interesting questions are: how big an investment are we willing to make to bring about that change and how fast are we willing to make that investment?

UC-Berkeley professor of energy Dan Kammen is well-known around the country and throughout the world for his work in renewable energy science and policy. Recently, he and a team of academics, entrepreneurs, business leaders and policymakers released a 141-page report, 18 months in the making, called "The Gigaton Throwdown'' that outlines a path for a dramatic expansion in the development and deployment of renewable and low-carbon energy. The team focused on what it would take for nine different technologies to reduce the annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases by a least 1 billion metric tons, or one gigaton, by 2020. A copy of the report has been widely distributed on Capitol Hill, and has been presented to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a colleague of Kammen's. The Mercury News talked to Kammen about the report, some of its conclusions and whether it can have an impact on U.S. energy policy. The interview was edited for clarity.

Controversial climate change legislation will not move out of a key Senate committee until September, after lawmakers return from their summer recess, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer told reporters today. Just two days after the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee opened hearings aimed at quick passage of climate legislation, Senator Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, said she has changed the target date for mark up of the bill from August 7 to sometime in early September.

John Holdren, science advisor to President Barack Obama, swung by Blighty today for some tea and crumpets with the Brits. But before embarking on a who's who tour of UK science policymakers, he joined the press in the basement of the US embassy for some all-American cookies and black coffee. Most of his hour-long round table was spent discussing climate change. He expressed some disappointment with the climate change legislation winding its way through the US Congress, but sees it as a make-or-break step for getting an effective international accord out of the UN's Copenhagen conference, which will take place in December. Some of the reporters expressed scepticism that a bill could be passed in time, but Holdren was optimistic, noting that the administration only needed around 12-15 additional votes in the Senate to pass the legislation. "I would still bet that it will happen, but I have to admit that it's going to be a challenge," he said.

The Senate is holding its first hearings on pending climate change legislation, and disagreements among senators are stark. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and the chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, accused Republicans of blocking climate and energy solutions and perpetuating "a pattern of no - no, we can't. No, we won't." Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican, fired back. "Once the American public realizes what this legislation will do to their wallets, they will soundly reject it," he said.

In this remember-when photograph, a big crowd gathered on Nov. 4, 1963 to witness the shutdown of the historic Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge. Note the relative dearth of women in the crowd. The Graphite Reactor, of course, was built during World War II as a prototype facilitiy for production of plutonium. It was the world's first continuously operated nuclear reactor and went critical for the first time in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 4, 1943. The reactor operated for 20 years, contributing greatly to the nation's development of radioisotopes for medicine and other uses and for pioneering work with neutron-scattering experiments, etc.

Antoinette Bonsignore, writing on behalf of the Alliance of Nuclear Worker Advocacy Group, has responded the Labor Dept.'s recent response (by Rachel Leiton) to the group's criticisms of the federal agency and the performance evaluation of the sick nuclear workers compensation program. The letter states that ANWAG stands behind its earlier criticisms and said important issues continue to be ignored by the Labor Department. Here is a copy of the letter, dated today: ALLIANCE OF NUCLEAR WORKER ADVOCACY GROUPS

Eleven Greenpeace protesters were reportedly arrested today after hanging a banner on Mt. Rushmore. Here is the Washington Post story.

As with most presidential campaign promises, Barack Obama's pledge of government openness isn't lasting long. A top gauleiter at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency appears to be indulging in the same type of cover-ups that Democrats on the 2008 campaign trail so ardently accused the Bush Administration of conducting. Al McGartland, director of the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics, has chastised the authors of an EPA study that knocked gaping holes of logic in the agency's decision to label life-sustaining carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Los Angeles will eliminate the use of electricity made from coal by 2020, replacing it with power from cleaner renewable energy sources, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. Consumers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest city-owned utility in the United States with 1.45 million electricity customers, will see higher power bills in the fight against climate change, he added in his inaugural speech for his second four-year term as mayor on Wednesday.

competitiveness WASHINGTON - Building on the action by the U.S. House of Representatives in passing historic legislation that will pave the way for the transition to a clean energy economy, President Barack Obama and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced aggressive actions to promote energy efficiency and save American consumers billions of dollars per year. Today's announcement underscores how the clean energy revolution not only makes environmental sense, but it also makes economic sense - creating jobs and saving money. "One of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to make our economy stronger and cleaner is to make our economy more energy efficient," said President Obama. "That's why we made energy efficiency investments a focal point of the Recovery Act. And that's why today's announcements are so important. By bringing more energy efficient technologies to American homes and businesses, we won't just significantly reduce our energy demand; we'll put more money back in the pockets of hardworking Americans."

Ontario, Canada's economic hub, announced Monday the suspension of its plan to build two new nuclear reactors, citing concerns about vendor Atomic Energy Canada Limited's viability, and pricing. The provincial government said AECL's bid to build the two new nuclear power plants at its Darlington station, 43 miles (70 kilometers) east of Toronto, by 2018 was the only one to meet its terms and objectives. The project was to be the first step in the modernization of Ontario's aging nuclear fleet. France's Areva and Westinghouse Electric Company, a subsidiary of Japan's Toshiba, had also bid on the project in February.