USA:

Moniz Takes New Crosscutting Approach to DOE’s R&D Programs (Physics Today)

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz

In remarks delivered during a 16 September event to display for US senators some of the national laboratories’ capabilities, and in comments to reporters at the event, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said the labs “are playing an important role in how we think about developing our strategic programs”—crosscutting thrusts of the department that might be more fully exploited.

Moniz cited subsurface science and engineering as “a place where we are not probably as well recognized as having tremendous capacity that cuts across so many of our programs: hydrocarbon production, geothermal, nuclear waste management, carbon sequestration etc.”

The agency’s high-performance computing programs, once mainly the province of the nuclear weapons enterprise, have migrated to involve primarily the science and energy programs. At a recent “ideas summit,” he said, top Department of Energy and lab officials discussed other crosscutting capabilities that the agency will propose to emphasize as part of its fiscal year 2016 budget submission.

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