Announcing a five-year extension of the UT-Batelle contract to run Oak Ridge National Laboratories, U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu gave the lab’s staff something of a pep rally today.
Talking about climate change and America’s changing needs, he told the group that, in coming years, innovation need not always apply for funding first.
He used the Manhattan Project – the creation of the atomic bomb in the 1930s and ’40s – as an example of the government bringing together experts in their fields and saying, ‘Here’s a problem, solve it,’ then figuring out where the funding was coming from.
Under a new program now in development, the DOE is looking for innovation like that again, he said.