Nautilus Receives Asian Energy Security Grant from DOE
Monday, June 14, 1999
The US Department of Energy (DOE)* has given the Nautilus Institute a three year, $250,000 annual grant to support the Institute’s work on energy security in Asia. “The Asian Energy Security project aims to improve common understandings and build confidence between actually or potentially adversarial states by increasing the transparency of energy planning and nuclear power projections in the region,” said Peter Hayes, Nautilus Institute co-Executive Director, in announcing the grant.
“The comprehensive energy security calculus to be produced by the project will also be very salient to policy issues in Japan, Korea and China in the next few years as regional energy policy makers search for conceptual foundations for alternatives to their commitment to plutonium-based energy security,” Hayes added.
The specific objectives of the project are to:
- Develop a new operational paradigm of energy security for states in the Northeast Asian region by engaging key energy analysts and planners in the region in collaborative conceptual and applied work with American counterparts. This element builds on the conceptual foundations laid down in the Nautilus Institute’s Energy, Security, Environment in Northeast Asia (ESENA) and Pacific Asian Regional Energy Security (PARES) projects.
- Construct collaboratively alternative energy futures from energy plans and projections in each country. Projections for energy needs, nuclear power, and plutonium in the form of spent fuel will be placed in a common software framework to make assumptions and sources transparent. In this activity, national analysts will be commissioned to conduct energy security analyses in the common framework.
- Train national counterparts who will participate in the construction of common databases and regional projections based on bottom-up national estimates using a common energy-economy modeling software framework.
- Conduct a mission to review the institutional framework in each country in the region, and to identify the key energy planning experts in each country who can produce national studies in a common analytical framework, including common time horizons for analysis, and whose participation will influence national energy planning and reliance on plutonium strategies to achieve energy security.
- Conduct a regional energy security workshop to present national analyses of regional energy futures and the role of nuclear power in providing energy security.
- Maintain and extend the Institute’s existing modeling of the energy economy of each country in Northeast Asian region, and use this as a reference benchmark for the work of national counterparts in the regional project.
The grant is administered through the DOE’s Oakland Operations Office.*
The Institute will announce shortly a search for research staff to implement this project, which is closely interrelated with the East Asian Energy Futures and Pacific Energy Regional Security Projects, supported by the W. Alton Jones Foundation. For more information, contact Peter Hayes at <phayes@nautilus.org.
RELATED LINK:
On DOE Web site: Nautilus thank-you letter* to DOE staff who helped with the grant process