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What’s Ahead
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| Ukraine’s science minister Shkarlet Serhiy, on screen, addresses a June 13 meeting of science ministers from the G7 countries, including White House Office of Science and Technology Policy acting director Alondra Nelson, in foreground. Two days prior, OSTP announced the U.S. will restrict science partnerships with Russia. (Image credit – OSTP) |
US Starts to ‘Wind Down’ Science Partnerships with Russia
The White House announced over the weekend that the U.S. government will “wind down” research collaborations with institutions affiliated with the Russian government in response to its invasion of Ukraine. The White House indicates it has instructed federal agencies to “curtail interaction” with such institutions as well as with individuals who have expressed support for the invasion, while allowing non-government institutions to make their own decisions on whether to sever ties. The announcement adds that the U.S. will limit engagement with Russia in multilateral projects related to science and technology, “except where required by our obligations under international law.” Many European governments quickly restricted scientific exchanges with Russia in the wake of the invasion, but the White House had been silent on the subject until now.
Senators Examine Case for High-Skilled Immigration Reform
With Congress currently weighing proposals to expedite visas for STEM graduate degree holders, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee is holding a hearing on Tuesday to discuss options for “strengthening our workforce and economy through higher education and immigration.” The House’s America COMPETES Act of 2022 would exempt holders of STEM doctoral degrees or certain master’s degrees from annual caps on green cards and create a new visa pathway for immigrant entrepreneurs, but the Senate’s counterpart U.S. Innovation and Competition Act does not include any provisions to increase immigration. At a March hearing, Subcommittee Chair Alex Padilla (D-CA) argued any compromise legislation should include measures to “build our domestic STEM workforce and encourage startup companies to establish roots here,” and Subcommittee Ranking Member John Cornyn (R-TX) has said he is open to including STEM immigration provisions in the final bill. However, Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has opposed including any immigration policy changes in the bill, arguing they should instead be debated through separate immigration reform legislation.
Science Committee Reviewing Outlook for Weather Research
The House Science Committee is meeting Tuesday to hear perspectives from academia and the private sector on “the future of weather research.” The committee has taken a strong interest in the topic, playing a lead role in crafting the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017. The witnesses for the hearing are University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Fred Carr, Spire Global vice president Kevin Petty, Rutgers University oceanography professor Scott Glenn, and American Meteorological Society president-elect Brad Colman, who is also director of weather strategy for The Climate Corporation. Glenn and Colman co-chaired a recent study that proposes weather research priorities for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to pursue over the next ten years. Carr and Petty also participated in the study, which Congress directed NOAA’s Science Advisory Board to undertake. Among its recommendations are to expand social science research on how the public uses weather forecast products and to increase NOAA’s computing power at least 100-fold, in part to address a current disparity between the amount of supercomputing resources available for research versus operational forecasts.
NIST Advisory Panel to Hear Update on Reactor Restart
The principal advisory committee for the National Institute of Standards and Technology is meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday. Laurie Locascio, who was confirmed as NIST director in April, will present a general update on the agency as well as review its efforts to bolster U.S. global economic competitiveness. The committee will also hear an update on ongoing work to restart the reactor at the NIST Center for Neutron Research, which has been offline since a radiation incident occurred there in February 2021. Slides posted ahead of the meeting indicate NIST has decided to replace fuel elements that were in the core at the time of the incident, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is holding a meeting on June 21 to discuss necessary steps for allowing NIST to bring a greater-than-usual amount of highly enriched uranium onsite to perform the refueling. The slides also indicate that NIST aims to start testing the reactor at low power as soon as August if the next steps in its corrective action plan go smoothly.
House Begins Advancing Spending Bills Without Budget Deal
The House Appropriations Committee is holding a series of meetings starting this week to advance its fiscal year 2023 spending proposals for federal agencies, despite Democratic and Republican leaders not yet agreeing on budget limits for the year. House Democrats adopted a $1.6 trillion cap, in line with President Biden’s budget request, but they have not yet indicated how the Appropriations Committee will apportion the funds between its 12 subcommittees that draft agency-level budgets. The subcommittees with jurisdiction over most non-defense science agencies will advance their proposals next week and the full committee will take them up the following week. The proposals will be subject to significant revision, as any final legislation will require the support of at least 10 Republican senators to avoid a fillibuster. In the previous budget cycle, Democrats proposed large increases to non-defense R&D spending but ultimately scaled back their aspirations in negotiations with Republicans, who also secured additional funds for defense programs.
Committee Work on Annual Defense Bill in Full Swing
Work on the National Defense Authorization Act continues this week with a series of Senate Armed Services Committee meetings, all but one of which is closed to the public. The committee expects to vote by Thursday to advance the bill to the Senate floor, and its draft will be posted publicly sometime afterward. The House completed subcommittee work on its version of the bill last week. Among the innovation policy proposals on the table so far is a provision that would authorize new R&D on bioindustrial manufacturing processes, including through the expansion or creation of a Manufacturing USA institute. Additional science and technology policy provisions will be attached when the full House Armed Services Committee takes up the bill on June 22.
USGS and ARPA–E Director Nominations Set to Advance
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is meeting Tuesday to vote on the nominations of David Applegate to lead the U.S. Geological Survey and Evelyn Wang to lead the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, advancing them to the full Senate for final approval. Both were warmly received by the committee at an April hearing on their nominations. Applegate, a geologist, has been acting director of USGS since the start of the Biden administration and previously led its natural hazards programs for a decade. Wang is an expert in thermal management in energy systems and chairs the mechanical engineering department at MIT.
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In Case You Missed It
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| Ken Graham at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, where he served as director for four years. (Image credit – NOAA) |
Kenneth Graham Named National Weather Service Director
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on June 7 that it had promoted National Hurricane Center director Kenneth Graham to lead the National Weather Service, effective immediately. Graham joined NWS as a meteorological intern in 1994 after earning a master’s degree in geoscience from Mississippi State University and spent much of his career leading the agency’s forecast office for the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, area. NWS currently has over 4,000 employees and an annual budget of about $1 billion, supporting more than 100 forecast offices across the U.S. Graham succeeds Louis Uccellini, who retired last September after almost a decade as director.
DOE Equity Office Head Confirmed, Electricity Nominee Withdrawn
The Senate confirmed environmental lawyer and energy justice expert Shalanda Baker to lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Economic Impact and Diversity by a vote of 54 to 45 on June 7, almost a year after her nomination was first approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Baker has been serving as the office’s first-ever deputy director for energy justice since the start of the Biden administration and has been responsible for implementing the Justice40 initiative at DOE, which aims to deliver “at least 40% of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities.” Meanwhile, President Biden withdrew his nomination of Massachusetts state representative and clean energy policy expert Maria Robinson to lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity. The Energy Committee deadlocked on Robinson’s nomination in a party-line vote on May 3, but there was no apparent obstacle to her ultimate confirmation. Last week, the Senate also confirmed Chavonda Jacobs-Young to be the Department of Agriculture’s under secretary for research, education, and economics on a vote of 95 to 4. She had led USDA’s Agricultural Research Service since 2014.
OSTP National Security Lead Jason Matheny to Head RAND
The RAND Corporation announced last week that Jason Matheny will join the organization as its new CEO on July 5. Matheny was until recently deputy director for national security at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as well as a member of the National Security Council staff. Prior to joining the White House in March 2021, Matheny led Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, which he founded in 2019 after serving three years as director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which supports R&D on behalf of U.S. intelligence agencies. RAND is a major nonprofit think tank with large portfolios in national security studies and science and technology policy. Matheny departed OSTP on June 3 and his deputy director position is being filled on an interim basis by Morgan Dwyer, an engineer and technology policy analyst who is the office’s principal assistant director for national security.
DOE Previews $8 Billion Hydrogen Hub Program
Last week, the Department of Energy outlined how it will implement an $8 billion regional hydrogen production hub program funded by last year’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. DOE plans to select between six and ten hubs, each of which will receive up to $1.25 billion to cover up to half of their total project costs. DOE intends to support each hub for roughly a decade across four project phases, reevaluating them at critical milestones as they move from planning and development to sustained operations. The department is looking to support technologies capable of producing at least 50 to 100 metric tons of hydrogen per day while keeping carbon emissions below 2 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen produced. While the carbon limit applies only to on-site emissions, DOE will give preference to technologies that reduce emissions across the full project lifecycle. It will also embed “principles of equity and justice” in the program’s implementation. The department expects to begin soliciting project proposals this fall in parallel with a separate infrastructure law program that will fund four regional direct air capture hubs.
Science Committee Report Outlines Methane Mitigation Strategy
In conjunction with a hearing last week on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, the House Science Committee’s Democratic majority released a staff report arguing fossil fuel companies are failing to adequately monitor and repair methane leaks, especially intermittent “super-emitting” leaks that constitute a disproportionate fraction of the sector’s emissions. Based on consultations with scientific experts and ten oil and gas operators in the Permian Basin, the report concludes leak detection and repair technologies can adequately quantify methane emissions but that they have been deployed in a “limited and inconsistent manner” and the data they produce have largely not been incorporated into operations. The report recommends the Environmental Protection Agency oversee a “methane census” that would provide improved data, that EPA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology develop protocols for aggregating data, and that the Department of Energy support R&D to address methane-monitoring capability gaps. It also proposes creating a “methane emissions measurement and mitigation research consortium” to encourage partnerships between industry and academia. At the hearing, Committee Ranking Member Frank Lucas (R-OK) called curbing methane emissions “low-hanging fruit” in climate change mitigation, but he also argued that EPA regulatory procedures have slowed the deployment of methane-monitoring technologies.
Radiation Exposure Compensation Extended Two Years
On June 7, President Biden signed a bill into law that extends the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990 by two years. The act, which was set to expire in July, allows people suffering from certain diseases linked to their exposure to radiation from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests or uranium industry employment to claim compensation from the government. Praising the extension as a “victory for radiation exposure victims,” one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), said the move buys time to negotiate within Congress about a longer-term extension and an “expansion of benefits and eligibility.” Proposed eligibility expansions include increasing the geographic reach of where people exposed to fallout resided and extending the timeframe of uranium industry employment into the period after 1971. However, revising the eligibility criteria is not universally accepted. For instance, the geographic expansion was not supported by a 2005 National Academies report, and uranium production after 1971 was primarily for commercial uses, whereas the act is intended to address harms caused by the government.
NASA Makes Bid to Unravel Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Mystery
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate announced last week it is setting up an independent study of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), which is the Department of Defense’s term for things its personnel have observed that appear to be aircraft exhibiting improbable aeronautical behaviors. The study is expected to last nine months and will be chaired by astrophysicist David Spergel, who is currently president of the Simons Foundation. DOD officials recently testified before Congress that they are establishing systematic procedures for observing and analyzing UAPs in the hope of rigorously characterizing them and mitigating any threat they might present. NASA’s study is separate from that effort but similar in its ambition to bring scientific rigor and a wide range of expertise to the subject. “Given the paucity of observations, our first task is simply to gather the most robust set of data that we can. We will be identifying what data — from civilians, government, nonprofits, companies — exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyze it,” Spergel remarked in a statement.
DOD Moves Ahead With Mobile Reactor Prototype
Last week, the Department of Defense selected the company BWXT Advanced Technologies to build a prototype mobile nuclear reactor under the department’s Project Pele initiative. DOD originally selected three potential reactor designs for the project in 2020 and last year awarded follow-on design contracts to BWXT and the company X-energy, which is already developing a larger reactor demonstration project for the Department of Energy. BWXT received $42 million through the earlier phases of the competition and will receive up to an additional $300 million to deliver its final product in fiscal year 2024. BWXT’s reactor employs TRISO, a pellet-based uranium fuel designed to resist meltdowns, and, like an earlier generation of small-scale reactors, it is designed to serve military energy needs in remote locations. The completed prototype will be shipped to DOE’s Idaho National Lab, where it will be tested for up to three years.
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Events This Week
All times are Eastern Daylight Time, unless otherwise noted. Listings do not imply endorsement.
Monday, June 13
American Astronomical Society: 240th Meeting
(continues through Thursday)
Tuesday, June 14
Wednesday, June 15
Thursday, June 16
Friday, June 17
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Opportunities NSF Hiring Earth Science Division Director
The National Science Foundation is hiring a director for its Earth Science Division, which supports research aimed at improving understanding of the Earth’s environments, natural resources, and geologic hazards. Applicants should have a doctorate in earth sciences and a history of significant research and service contributions to the earth sciences community. Applications are due July 8.
DOE Hiring Nuclear Energy Justice Policy Fellows
The Department of Energy is hiring fellows who will work to integrate energy justice considerations into DOE’s nuclear energy programs. The fellowship is targeted toward recent graduates of undergraduate or graduate degree programs, though other candidates may be considered. Applicants should have experience working in areas such as social justice, environmental justice, energy justice, data science, geospatial analysis, nuclear energy, or nuclear waste. The one-year fellowships can be renewed for up to four years. DOE is ready to make appointments immediately.
AAAS S&T Policy Fellowship Application Now Open
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is accepting applications for its 2023-2024 S&T Policy Fellowship program. Fellows spend a year at a federal agency or congressional office in Washington, D.C., gaining experience in the policymaking process. Applicants must have a doctoral-level degree or a master’s degree in engineering with three years of engineering experience in order to qualify.
Know of an upcoming science policy event either inside or outside the Beltway? Email us at fyi@aip.org.
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