Department Of Energy U S

A decadelong effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays and exacerbated concerns about the Energy Department's ability to maintain the nation's strategic deterrent. The program involves a type of warhead known as the W76, which is used on the Navy's Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the U.S. stockpile.

President-elect Barack Obama will tap Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu as his Energy secretary and former New Jersey environmental protection commissioner Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, a senior Democrat said Wednesday. In addition, Carol Browner, a former EPA administrator, will serve as a high-level coordinator on energy issues, reporting to the president.

With the nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu for Energy secretary, President-elect Barack Obama made sure no one missed the message in the resume. "His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science," Obama said during a Chicago news conference Monday. "We will make decisions based on facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action."

The Department of Energy on Monday cited the University of California for 15 violations of safety rules in 2005 involving nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including a case of mishandled materials where low levels of radiation were spread across several states. The violations would have carried a $1.1-million fine, but federal law waves such penalties for certain nonprofit contractors.

Over the last three decades, the federal government has missed legal deadlines for setting stricter efficiency standards for common appliances, resulting in billions of dollars in higher utility bills and millions more tons of the greenhouse gases that fuel global warming, congressional investigators reported.

California's pump prices skyrocketed during the last week, putting the state into $3-a-gallon territory for the first time this year, the Energy Department said Monday. The statewide average price for a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline hit $3.068, up 17.1 cents from the previous week and 53.6 cents above year-earlier levels, according to the Energy Department's weekly survey of gasoline stations. The latest California average wasn't close to the record $3.

Hoping to salvage strict water-saving rules for washing machines, the California Energy Commission said Friday that it had notified the agency that blocked the rules that it would be filing suit. The commission also said it had asked a federal court to review the action by the U.S. Energy Department, in the latest legal skirmish stemming from California's push for more stringent regulations covering water and energy use, air emissions and other environmental threats.

The United States lacks a clear policy on the future of its nuclear weapons forces, complicating an effort to develop a new generation of bombs, a group of highly influential scientists said Tuesday. At the same time, they said, bottlenecks have developed in the weapons production system, particularly at a Texas assembly plant, that could undermine efforts to produce large numbers of new bombs or even maintain the existing stockpile.

Federal energy regulators Thursday singled out most of Southern California as an area in need of more high-voltage power lines and set in motion a process to make it happen -- even if state officials balk. Critics warned that the move could potentially gut local and state authorities' control of the siting of the transmission lines, among the most controversial issues that state and local agencies address.

The Energy Department on Tuesday awarded a seven-year contract to operate Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to an industry consortium that includes the University of California, which has run the lab since it opened in 1952. This year the lab was selected by the Energy Department to design and develop a new generation of nuclear bombs, known as the reliable replacement warhead. A report by an independent group of scientists warned that the project faced serious technical challenges.